Hello All,
I apologize in advance for the length of this email but I'm just curious
about something and thought I'd send out a feeler. While recently revamping
my personal website, I had some specific requirements based on experiences
on other websites. My favorite example that I wanted to avoid is the "ribbon
blog". I read a lot of blog entries either as part of a search for
information or just casual reading. A problem I see a lot is the 400
comments below the blog that stretch on forever and ever with like 200
pixels of background (or more) on either side. I read the comments since
they often contain valuable info as well and I use a large resolution, so
that fixed layout kills me. I thought it might be a good idea if those
designers had included a "snap to full-width" button which would switch the
blog to the full width of the viewport. Now it occurred to me (and probably
to you) that I could kill their styles altogether or they could have allowed
a style switch, but I also found out a reason why they might not.
Take for instance, the blog example. We have a blog we've formatted to a
fixed width. But, we want to include a fluid width as well for easier
reading of those lengthy entries. BUT we also have two themes: a light
background and a dark background.
Doing this is not possible in current browsers (X=active and O=inactive):
X - darkBG.css
O - lightbg.css
X - fixed.css
O - fluid.css
So, we work around it in this way:
X - @include(dark.css);@include(fixed.css)
O - @include(dark.css);@include(fluid.css)
O - @include(light.css);@include(fixed.css)
O - @include(light.css);@include(fluid.css)
* - darkBG.css
* - lightbg.css
* - fixed.css
* - fluid.css
Or in this way:
X - fixedDark.css
O - fluidDark.css
O - fixedLight.css
O - fluidLight.css
"Yeah, so? Big deal." you might be thinking, but what happens if we want to
include more themes? Or column configurations? Say we want to add an example
where the menu is on the left, or the right, or across the top? You can see
this quickly becomes a nightmare of includes.
There's javascript, sure. Couldn't we also try to advocate the introduction
of something like familied style sheets though? And then allow a browser to
specify an active stylesheet for each family, rather than just one active
stylesheet?
Then, our example could use this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="dark.css"
media="screen,projection" family="Theme" title="The Dark Side" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="light.css"
media="screen,projection" family="Theme" title="Show Me the Light" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="fixed.css"
media="screen,projection" family="Layout" title="Fixed Width" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="fluid.css"
media="screen,projection" family="Layout" title="Fluid Width" />
...and show this in the "View > Page Style" options:
Theme
X - The Dark Side
O - Show Me the Light
Layout
X - Fixed Width
O - Fluid Width
Maybe the introduction of such a thing to the W3C is a pipe dream and
getting even Firefox or another fairly compliant browser to begin to
implement that borders on the delusional, but I think my bigger question is
this: Am I missing something? Is there some way outside the use of
Javascript to implement such a thing already that I just overlooked? Perhaps
even more important than that is the question of whether or not ANYBODY else
agrees with me that something like that might be useful. I'm not too proud
to think I might be the only one who could find uses for that.
Thoughts, opinions, insults?
Bill
|================================|
| Bill Brown |
| Webmaster, MacNimble.com |
| http://www.macnimble.com |
| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Phone: 215-237-2037 |
|================================|
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