I have a requirement to allow users to change such things as colour, font etc. for certain markup. Currently this is all 'wrapped' by CSS ids/classes but the use of varying ids/classes seems wrong.
The use case if for engineers viewing data from sensors. Some engineers require values below a certain value to be highlighted whereas other engineers want values above a certain value to be highlighted. The highlighting might means changing the font to bold, the background colour to yellow, the foreground colour to red and the surrounding box to double lines. I could have CSS classes of highlight1, highlight2 etc but read on. In essence the markup is exactly the same but for the highlighting rules so having a number of sub classed pages is not correct. In addition, the rules at which something may change might change at run time. For example, one particular engineer may be monitoring a system where a value is highlighted if it goes outside of a range and another highlight if the erroneous value has been out of range for an extended time period. Basically, each engineer can choose their own colour scheme. Also, for very complex situations an engineer would be overloaded by too much information. In these cases they dim down the non important data so that the important data becomes more prominent. OK, I could define a bigger set of CSS classes for each situation but each engineer has a different way of solving the viewing problem and the current system (not web based) does what they want. So, I think the solution lies in the dynamic generation of the CSS at run time from the database. I then thought I would create a small servlet to handle this but then, I already have Wicket running, maybe I should sub class Page and make a CssPage class. I need to have a pop at doing this in the future anyway for WML so the research would not be wasted. I was wondering if anyone had any experience or advice before I look into this in more detail. Eric.
