Re: Font definition

>From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
>
>* declare "variables" at the top of a stylesheet and reference them where
>* needed. Color schemes are the example that spring to mind.
>
>You may mean the bottom.  Assuming the same cascade rules are applied,
>later definitions will take precedence over earlier ones.  One could
>limit their scope to a single file, to get round that, but I suspect
>you might actually want to have the definitions in one file and the
>main rules in another.
I really meant the physical top of a style sheet, the generally agreed on 
way constants in programming languages are defined. ^.- I meant to imply 
nothing about logical location by that comment, it was just a description to 
visualize with.

>I suspect you are thinking in standard designer "I must totally control the
>user experience" mode, whereas CSS has a fundamental rule that the user
>has last say.
I couldn't care less whether users want my style or they want their own. I 
would assume a user's stylesheet would override my definitions whether I 
used a 'preprocessed' variable or a hard-coded number. This is just to 
simply design of stylesheet heigharchies. There was another comment that 
expressed that such spaced-out "common collections" of styles could be 
concatenated into one with commas, and I do use that sometimes, but it 
becomes a pain if you need to quickly change a few of them rather than all 
of them.

In fact it may make user-overriding easier, if the method was published (or 
they took a look at the site's stylesheet); instead of having to confront a 
confusing garble of cascading syntax of tags and id/class names, a user can 
view and modify the (hopefully) easy-to-grasp variable names and make simple 
changes. That lowers the expertise-required bar considerably.

Obviously if they wanted to make my site do something I hadn't coded for, 
that'd be different, but shrug, I'm not here to think of every possibile 
combination for them. That's what regular CSS would be for.

I still think the collection idea has merit; rather than just a single 
constant being replaced by a tag, an entire rule or several rules can be 
held in a tag. The preprocessor sweep would still be exactly the same.

I'll probably say more once I'm not dead asleep.

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Received on Thursday, 29 May 2003 18:04:48 UTC