I met with a programmer today to actually discuss the idea of a Portland,
Oregon based WSG - he likes the idea and will talk to others about the idea.
However, during our ongoing 3 hour conversation over a few pints, the
discussion eventually moved from WSG to web design and then to experimental
design.
Then an interesting idea hit the table, what is to prevent a person from
creating a dynamic stylesheet.
Has anyone ever toyed with this idea before and if so what were the results???
It depends on your definition of dynamic... I've built PHP-driven stylesheets to serve a stylesheet customised to the browser or user, but I was concerned about the caching which:
- if it cached, wouldn't be dynamic - if it didn't cache, would cost bandwidth and performance
It enabled me to do really simple stuff, like store my colour pallet in PHP variables, allowing for hassle free redesigns and tweaking (body { background-color: <?=$col1?>; ?> for example). And more complicated stuff like testing for certain user-agent strings for tweaking, or even user-preference based style-sheets and style-sheets to reflect the time of day, or the weather, or whatever else... the guts of the problem (which I haven't properly investigated) was caching...
I think a more realistic option would be using PHP to dynamically *link* to an appropriate STATIC style-sheet (eg ie6.css, or nighttime.css or winter.css), which would still allow full caching by the browser.
Now, since I just had my wisdom teeth out last night, I should go back to the couch :)
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
*****************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
*****************************************************
