On Monday, May 16, 2005 3:17 AM [GMT+0100=CET],jack fredricks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> it also seems like it'd be a pain to develop two sheets at >> once not to mention potential for mistakes... > > please read what you've just said again, then ask yourself "what > benefits do i get from separating my stylesheets into 2 stylesheets > (one for color, one for structure). > > If there is no development benefit, why do it?
There might be a huge *user* benefit, at the cost of more complex development. The two cases that spring to mind are: 1. Letting the user pick a color scheme for your site. I've seen some that do this, and although I often wonder "what's the point?", if that's a requirement, separating structure and color stylesheets would be a good technique to adopt. 2. Suppose you're developing a commercial product instead of a single site. Take the idea a little bit further. Make one stylesheet contain structure and the other contain color, font family (but not font size), background images, and anything else visual that doesn't affect layout. Now you've got a fairly simple way to allow your customers to brand your product - they can replace the "visuals" stylesheet with their own fonts, colors, logos, etc. This isn't a perfect model, of course. For example, a customer's standard might include font sizes or logo sizes different from yours, in whch case they might affect layout. In that case, they'd need to modify the layout sheet as well. But if you can design a completely fluid site, or can require certain font/logo sizes, it would work fairly well as described. As a commercial-product-developer who is expecting any week now to hear "customer X would really like their logo instead of ours" or "the UI is getting a bit stale. can you jazz it up?", I find this a very interesting idea ... Rob Freundlich "Males ae biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes." - Newt Gingrich "Some folks you don't have to satirize, you just quote 'em." - Tom Paxton ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
