Dear Log,
At times, a particular kind of monomania comes over me. It has roughly the form "doing this thing should be simple, so I'll spend five minutes trying to figure out how... [an hour goes by] ... this is not as simple as it should be, therefore I must NEVER GIVE UP!"
The other day I just wanted to change the color of quoted text in
Thunderbird message-reply windows. (Not message viewing
windows -- that is widely documented as a matter of having
a blockquote[type=cite] { ... } rule in your
Thunderbird userContent.css file.)
Googling showed nothing. The DOM
Inspector wasn't installable, or it would have taken me just seconds
to find out the relevant classname. I ended up digging thru endless
layers of Mozilla source code. Message viewing is a native part of
Thunderbird, but the editing part is passed off, thru layers of
indirection, to libeditor, which is way more than I wanted to know.
The answer ends up being a userContent.css rule like so:
span[_moz_quote=true],
pre[_moz_quote=true]
{
color: #f99 !important;
font-size: smaller;
background-color: #000;
}
...which I shall now submit to the Moz documentation people for
inclusion in some TIPS 'N' TRICKS! page or something.
I think it took me about four hours of source-code-browsing fugue state to find that.