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Comment by leddt | Hacker News Reader

While it's certainly a neat trick, I wonder if there is any real world application to such techniques.

When I saw the title I expected to see something about using CSS for things other than styling HTML. It may be useful, for example, to use CSS to style native GUI applications or similar.

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You can in fact apply CSS to non-HTML documents through the `Link` header. Here’s an example: http://eligrey.com/blog/post/title-image-files-in-opera

Similarly, full `Link` header support would also make it possible to have feed-autodiscovery on non-HTML pages (like images, audio, video, plain text files, etc).

That is very interesting, thank you. I hope the Link header gets wider support in the future. It seems that it could be very useful.

One idea is injecting some temporary content in all pages of a site without changing the actual content. For example in the recent SOPA blackout, server owners could have injected a css file with a simple configuration of their webserver.

Doing the same trick also with Javascript (if you could) could keep the html pretty clean and tidy.

I'm not suggesting you would use the technique to build the main page content. Just the added extras.

Do the link elements add any semantic goodness to the document?

You could also use the web server to transparently add those headers to html output - rather than a scripting language such as php.

Yes there is, see my comment at http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3612459

Nice site. However you seem to be using CSS as it's intended: styling content. The featured article uses CSS to generate the entire content, which I doubt is of any use besides showing off.

> The featured article uses CSS to generate the entire content, which I doubt is of any use besides showing off.

That’s absolutely correct. (To be fair, this is mentioned in the article under “Disclaimer”.)

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