git ssb

title: "Stop! Thief!" date: 2004-05-21 01:07 status: published tags: CSS, The Twaddle

<p>
I've read articles about CSS design theft before - I never thought I'd be a victim. </p>
<p>
Check out these beauties: <a href="http://www.geocities.com/thehigh86/">1</a>, <a href="http://www.geocities.com/warworld1988/">2</a>. </p>
<p>
2 is obviously related to 1; I'm reliably informed that 2 is 1's brother. I pointed 1 towards my CSS for The (excellent) Twaddle (which we've just vamped once more - take a look) in order to help him learn CSS. I explicitly (although friendly...ly) told him not to nick it - to make his own. What does he go and do? </p>
<p>
Some of the CSS can only have been nicked, as it's both identical to (a former version of) mine, and a bit daft (i.e. it'd be an hellish coincidence if any brain other than mine came up with it). </p>
<p>
e.g.: in <a href="http://www.geocities.com/thehigh86/style.css">1's stylesheet</a>, the font declaration proceeds thus: <code>'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Treb, Helvetica, Helv, Arial, sans-serif</code>. I don't know of any fonts called Trebuchet or Treb; I just threw them in on the off-chance that there was a non-MS version or an incredibly old version (I know Helv does/did exist); I recently removed the extraneous fonts. </p>
<p>
#content {list-style-type: none}?! I'm sure that was a daft cut-'n'-paste error I once made. Otherwise it's just stupid. .leftbox, .rightbox, .box-caption, .contentbox... </p>
<p>
Thief! Get off my CSS! </p>
<p>
He even has the audacity to include a <q>Copyright Policy</q> link to <a href="http://www.fact-uk.org.uk/">FACT</a>! OK, so maybe The Twaddle isn't exactly the least copyright-infringing website in existence (we've used photography found via Google), but we recently (very recently) switched the main site header to original photography and plan not to borrow from others if at all possible. </p>
<p>
In his defence... he's given us a link. That makes it OK then. Soon, I shall be providing a link to www.coldplay.com and creating a lot of original music. </p>