an example stylesheet

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Just as a followup to perhaps explain what I'm driving at in the somewhat
convoluted mail last night, I did an illustrative exercise.  I converted
the mailing list archives to use a style sheet, in this case "mail.css" .  
Initially it looked very much like the Krib (because I copied the Krib's
style sheet).  After the initial setup (which required changing the mail
archive program's configuration and regenerating the archive), it took me
about 5 minutes to change the font definitions in the style sheet to make
it have the same look as, for instance, Dave's contact list. The immediate
difference here being that it degrades gracefully to browsers that may not
have all the fonts and display capability.  But perhaps even more
importantly, if I want to make even a major change in the look, I need
only to edit the style sheet... no regenerating the archive required.

Notice that both the manually-generated file (the small index I stuck at
the entrance of the site) and the auto-generated files (everything else)
nominally conform to the style sheet.  If you do a "view source" you'll
see no <font> or <size> commands at all in the HTML documents, just
occasional "class=xyz" to denote special types of paragraphs.  Also of
note, on the "Accessibility" page of Internet Explorer, you can specify an
alternate style sheet with which to view all pages.  Basically, once we
have a site's logical attributes defined, it's a snap to change how it
physically looks.  We could try a background graphic.  After everyone goes
"ewwww", we can take it back out. :)

The downside: Frontpage and other "HTML Creator" programs are not real
good with style sheets yet, so it means that I'll need to do an initial
editing job on all the documents for the site, and if anyone else works on
them later they must swear to not re-run them through Front Page.

If you're still reading, check out http://lists.thekrib.com/aga-contest

The style sheet used is http://lists.thekrib.com/mail.css which can be
saved and edited with a text editor.

Another trick which I may use for creating things like the navigation bars
is "Server-Side Includes".  We will specify the contents of the navigation
bar in one file (along with the format tags to make it show up at the top
or the left of the screen).  Any change to the navigation is done onto the
included file, and will not require the whole site to be regenerated.
This is harder to show, because the document has already been
"reformatted" by the time it reaches your browser.

  - Erik

PS: Incidentally, my laptop PC running windows 98 does not have MS
Trebutect (sp) installed by default.  It displayed everything in times new
roman by default.

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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