Tech Info - W3C CSS2 Style Policy

As we start to move from our old fashioned CSS world to the bright, shiny, new one we thought we better have some policies to be clear on what we were doing - especially since a single style sheet is our goal (we think). Remember this is a transitional policy and we would probably not do this is we were starting from scratch. Remember also our characteristics:

• We are lazy and two-fingered typists. Short is very important.

• We have lousy memories and do not work on our site all the time (OK so it shows)

• We have a tendency to 'ready, fire, aim' so have made a number of bad decisions in the past. We can do global replaces on our site using our cool tools but prefer an evolutionary approach.

• We are hand coders - we started with FrontPage (OK, OK) and then switched to HTML-KIT about 5 years ago which we now love to death. OK so we would like a WYSIWYG table and text editor from time to time but when we need bulk input we use OpenOffice and dump the output as text files.

CSS Transition Policy

• We will keep our single site-wide style sheet as long as possible.

• We stopped using <Hx> tags some time ago in favour of '<p class=' since we thought this gave us more flexibility. This, in retrospect, was stupid (so what's new) since it removes structural description from the page which can be used by 'text-only' or other types of specialized browsers. We are slowly restoring this structural component.

  We have many pages which use <Hx> tags and which we do NOT want to use the new styles so we cannot use a simple Hx style definition. Instead we use a div and css selector. Basically we will wrap the pages or sections which we want to reformat in a 'div' tag which we will also use to loosely categorise pages for future use (e.g. products, tech, support, isp etc.) then use the following style definitions:

  <style>
  div.g-1 h4 {style def}
  .g-1 {minimal style definition}
  </style>
  <!-- HTML -->
  <div class="g-1">
  <!-- every h4 will have the h4 style applied -->
  </div>
  <!-- default h4 style applied -->
  

• As we used more styles we started to have problems with what to call them! We have tried to adopt a structured naming convention which was more concerned with the function of the style than its characteristics e.g a style that says 'border-blue' is of very little use (and positively confusing) when the style property are changed to red! We see vry little in the literature about this. Are we the only folks having this problem?

• During the conversion we have a number of redundant nested 'divs'. These appear to be harmless an are essential to allow older pages to work correctly. When site conversion is complete we can remove them since they are only present in a very few files.

Problems, comments, suggestions, corrections (including broken links) or something to add? Please take the time from a busy life to 'mail us' (at top of screen), the webmaster (below) or info-support at zytrax. You will have a warm inner glow for the rest of the day.