http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=44805

Since we seem to be running out of ideas for improving the monastery, and vroom seems awfully bored, I thought I'd pitch in. ;-)

Last night, when the chatterbox discussion turned to how bad my home node looks under the Dark Theme, Cascading Style Sheets came up. It seems to me that one of the easiest ways to enable folks to customize the look of the Monastery would be to allow them to specify the URL of a stylesheet to be placed in the head of every page they view. This would, essentially, turn every monk loose to more easily create and trade themes, and help decentralize some of the housekeeping here.

This would seem to be simple enough to implement, and would allow people to do neat things like create their own background graphics. For the sake of discusson, however, I'll mention some other possibilities.

More flexibility could be gained by adding extra attributes to various HTML tags, thus allowing the stylesheets to differentiate categories of elements. If the tags in the "Other Users" section, for instance, each specified area="users", it would be easy enough for a monk to make the Other Users background pink, while leaving the rest of the page purple.

It would be interesting as well if, on one's homenode, the author's stylesheet link could (depending on the viewer's preferences) take precedence over the viewer's. Thus people could *really* get creative with their home nodes, and yet never have need to store either graphics or style sheets on Perl Monks. As I can think of no security problems with this, it could, perhaps, make up for our necessary loss of JavaScript.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I realize that monks can create and submit their own themes for consideration, but it is, I think, preferable to allow vroom & friends to focus on content, rather than on presentation. And anyway, as a lowly Monk, I get a "tough beans" error when I try to read the Themes node. :-)

What do you think?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: On Stylesheets
by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Dec 04, 2000 at 21:15 UTC
    Build each major part of the site with a specific class name. <div class="user_profile">...</div>. For normal browsing, this will have no effect, but any CSS "themes" that choose to use them, the functionality will be there to hook normal CSS attributes into. We won't have to craft any special pseudo-CSS tags for our purposes. Just make sure each site element has an appropriate class set.
Re: On Stylesheets
by mdillon (Priest) on Dec 04, 2000 at 20:53 UTC
    you can see an earlier discussion on a similar topic here.
Re: On Stylesheets
by extremely (Priest) on Dec 05, 2000 at 07:40 UTC
    Well, until then, and likely even after stylesheets work, you should remember the simple rule: Set background and foreground colors together. Setting one or the other individually always gets you in trouble eventually.

    And yes, if vroom implements the external stylesheet hackery, setting some or

    tags about some of the more common items would be very nice of him. =)

    --
    $you = new YOU;
    honk() if $you->love(perl)

      Set background and foreground colors together

      I've already tried (albiet not persistently; I'm kind of busy just now). On my browser (Netscape 4.75 for Linux), the the dark page's link colors seem to override mine.

        Did you try with stylesheet style commands or with eldritch HTML2 and HTML3 commands? Try
        <table style="color: #336699; background: #cc3399"> </table>
        default from table style
        override in the tr tag
        Td tag override

        Ahh man vroom strips style tags...

        --
        $you = new YOU;
        honk() if $you->love(perl)

Re: On Stylesheets
by Caillte (Friar) on Dec 05, 2000 at 17:28 UTC

    This seems like a really fun idea! A simple way of implementing it would be to offer the user a style to set some defaults and, after selecting it, allow them to answer a few simple questions on a form in order to customise it. All pages then (except, say, user's home nodes)could have a link tag to the stylesheet in the viewer's home node. Anonymous monks would, of course, require a default.

    A home node, however, should be viewed in the owner's stylesheet though perhaps giving an option to switch would be fun ;)