Tip: Targeting a specific SharePoint site with global CSS

Just a little css tip, that came out handy today. Generally, with a global css (say, an alternate style sheet that is deployed throughout the site collection), you don't even attempt targeting some specific site, but go with the global styles instead. Today, however, I was struggling to display the titlerow (logo and navigation) in the enterprise search center without having it become visible in the dialogs as well.

Some Microsoft logic it is, I guess, that the search center by default hides the site collection navigation using the same class as the dialogs, the .ms-dialogHidden. And as anyone working with SharePoint CSS knows, the sites have no IDs in the body tag so that you could e.g. tell your css to display the navigation in search site but not in the dialogs. None, except for the action attribute in the form tag.

I guess it never was as big of an issue before, since I never thought of it before, but indeed, in a site collection already populated with sites, you can target one specific site by using the attribute selector for form tag in your css rule, for the form action contains the relative address of the site in it + in SharePoint, the whole page is always inside of that form tag. So here's the rule for un-hiding the titlerow for this specific search center, just as an example:

form[action*="searchcenter"] #s4-titlerow.ms-dialogHidden {

    display: block !important;

}

And, yey, the dialogs remain untouched and furthermore, there is no need to impelemnt page level css on each and every search center page.