Step One - Learning the r001z

There are certain things you can’t do on MySpace. Autoplaying “Maneater” is perfectly ok apparently, but these things are not:

• Using the # sign anywhere in your CSS. This is to avoid you messing with ID’ed elements, but its brute force removal also precludes you from properly specifying hex values. Instead, you must do things like color: FFFFFF or color: white. Note also that because the pound sign is missing, you cannot use shorthand like color: FFF.
• Specifying style rules for iframes. Apparently, this is to keep you from hiding MySpace’s banner ad, although it’s easy to do this anyway without touching the iframe. Don’t do it though unless you want your profile deleted.
• Placing comments in your CSS file. If you mark up your CSS file with standard (/*whatever*/) CSS comments, they will get stripped. Other styles of commenting “kind of” work, like double brackets ([[whatever]]) but they end up messing up the CSS code in some browsers. Interestingly though, downlevel-revealed (but not downlevel-hidden) IE conditional comments work just fine. We’ll use these in our hack in fact.
• Using shorthand for border styles. If you try something like border: 1px solid FF0000, it will not work in Firefox. Interesting, it seems to work if you use a keyword like red instead, so this probably has something to do with the hex issue mentioned above. The unfortunate workaround is to always specify your borders in longhand.
• Putting CSS anywhere but right smack dab in the middle of the content. You’d think it would be easy for the MySpace crew to let you specify your style rules in the head element where they belong, but nope, you have to stuff them into the “About Me” module which sits in the middle of the HTML. The result is an unavoidable FOBUC (or “Flash Of Butt-Ugly Content”) before your style rules kick in, but oh well. Such is life in the ghetto.