Style Sheets

[Thomas Dowling]

Let me humbly submit the OhioLINK web site as an example of not too bad CSS.
Our standard stylesheet is 449 bytes in size--not exactly a lot of code.
Our home page has 12 lines of embedded style, and our online catalog and
several other databases use another stylesheet that is 389 bytes in size.  I
have hooked a couple of licensed full-text databases to other stylesheets,
the largest of which is 1499 bytes.  Aside from our home page and those
full-text databases, which construct HTML on the fly anyway, there are
probably fewer than half a dozen CLASS= attributes on our site.

I do not use stylesheets as a way to enforce a wacky, way-kewl-dood page
appearance.  I think our stylesheets help make our site legible and
identifiable.

If you're interested, our style sheets are all
http://www.ohiolink.edu/style/

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew J. Mutch <amutch at tln.lib.mi.us>
To: Thomas Dowling <tdowling at ohiolink.edu>
Cc: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Monday, September 08, 1997 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: Style Sheets



>Tom,
>
>Like you, I've used my style sheets for consistent elements.  However, it
>seems to me that once you get around to defining specific elements, in
>terms of time and effort in creating and adding class-specific elements, I
>wonder how this is an improvement over what we currently do.  It seems
>like a lot of code to add for what appears to be, at best, a minor
>improvement.
>
>Maybe, I just need to see some "good" examples of how style sheets can be
>implemented along these lines.  Some of the examples at the Netscape site
>are quite atrocious looking...they make me think of blinking backgrounds.
>
>Andrew
>
>
>
>> I'm not at all sure I see the problem here.  A style sheet can be used to
>> define the default appearance for any element.  If you'd like to suggest
>> that all the <EM> elements in a page have a yellow background (like a
>> highlighter), you simply write that into the stylesheet--EM {background:
>> yellow}--and that's it.  If you'd like to apply this highlighting only to
a
>> subset of your <EM> elements, you define that as a new
>> class--EM.highlighted {background: yellow}--and then add the necessary
>> class attributes only to the EM tags you wish.
>>
>> I don't see the use of stylesheets as being a commitment to define the
>> appearance of every element in every page on your Web site; browser
>> defaults aren't usually *that* atrocious.  But if you find yourself
>> defining many of them the same way, you might find it easier to apply the
>> styles you like to the BODY element and let other elements inherit them.
>>
>> Our site, for example, uses a single linked stylesheet for almost every
>> page on the site, so we certainly don't have to go through page by page
and
>> identify styles we want to define.  Then we get most of what we want out
>> of:
>>
>> BODY {font-family: Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, sans-serif;
>>       background: #FFFFFF}
>>
>> (I know: dull, but legible.)
>>
>> Thomas Dowling
>> Ohio Library and Information Network
>> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
>>
>
>