Match CSS Themes From Target Sites

Feature Upgrade · Editor: plato · Created by lliraeden
declined
css style-matching customising customisation integration

What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

Currently using CSS (especially for a new person) is highly technical and fiddly, requiring a significant investment of time to learn what is needed to get the final result. For those of us looking to professionally publish work, we usually have a website which can have already had significant work or even professional design work completed.  

How does this feature request address the current situation?

If there were a way to auto-match CSS to a target website, this would streamline a lot of things - especially if it's possible to match the style, look and feel of existing author websites via matching CSS.  

What are other uses for this feature request?

It could enable embedding of the World Anvil product within author websites and create a seamless end-to-end user experience for world explorers, adding to the immersion and creative experience - which could further boost the usage of World Anvil.

Follow up


Current score

14/300 Votes · -1060 points

Votes Cast

  • -300

    by SpencerH23
    on 2022-05-02 16:53
    Unfortunately I think this idea isn’t at all plausible. While I do think that CSS should be overhauled or streamlined for people who either don’t want to invest that much time into it or made simpler because honestly it can be a bit of a learning curve (speaking from personal experience) this is not the way to do it.
  • -300

    by scholarmage
    on 2022-05-02 15:40
    If this was implemented for matching commercial sites, it would be grounds for World Anvil getting hit with a lawsuit on the basis of theft of intellectual property material, copyright, and impersonating trade dress. If aspects of the other website's design were trademarked, they would in fact be legally *required* to sue WA to be seen to protect their trademark.
  • -300

    by Toblin
    on 2022-04-26 12:20
    This would be virtually impossible to since each site uses their own CSS class names for things. In fact, I'm pretty sure it would be 100% impossible.
  • -300

    by A Glamorous Dimensional Horror
    on 2022-04-26 11:35
    Pie in the Sky? More like PIe in orbit around Alpha Centaury
  • -10

    by valhaia
    on 2022-04-26 01:59
    This is seemingly impossible, I think, and encroaches on creative/intellectual property. While I do believe WA is sorely due for something akin to a theme-builder for those who can't or don't have the time to learn CSS, I don't think this is the way to go about it.
  • -100

    by Scyoni
    on 2022-04-19 19:40
  • -100

    by Tobus
    on 2022-04-17 15:47
  • -10

    by A Adorable Skeleton
    on 2022-04-16 21:18
  • -100

    by Timepool
    on 2022-04-16 17:54
    If this were even remotely possible, the internet would appear much more homogenous than it currently does. But, it is not at all realistic. CSS is applied to each site's specific HTML elements, classes, and IDs— which change DRASTICALLY from website to website.   Think of it like trying to take all the innards from a truck— wheels, radio, dashboard widgets, and all— and attempting to put it inside a go kart. Not only is there a size mismatch, but there simply aren't places to put a lot of it because they are entirely different machines.
  • -100

    by tim-in-a-box
    on 2022-04-15 12:00
  • -10

    by Kros!
    on 2022-04-14 14:59
    What Naelin said. And also consider this: would you like that everybody will be able to justimportthe theme of your website that you paid for and publishtheir work with a graphical vestidentical to yours? Sometimes it's enough to walk a few steps inside other people's shoes. ;)
  • -20

    by A Wild Orc
    on 2022-04-13 19:23
  • -10

    by Naelin
    on 2022-04-13 18:26
    That sounds like a very oddly specific and very hard to implement feature, that would require WA to form a partnership with... every website? in order to be able to gather the CSS information from them.
    Websites with specific styles to them would also probably not be super on board with having their design work stripped and pasted to another websites.   If you have a website that has custom CSS that someone designed for you, the designer would only have to adapt that to WorldAnvil's specific selectors... which is the other issue with this. A random website will NOT have the same selectors, meaning there is little that can actually be modified with a 1-to-1 integration (for example: Your generic website probably won't have a calendar, family tree, article block, etc, and these all have their own CSS)   Tl;dr: This is not only very complicated to implement on a basic level, but also that basic level would leave you with a lot of work to do manually
  • +300

    by UnknownWriter88
    on 2022-04-13 14:27
  • +300

    by lliraeden
    on 2022-04-13 13:58