Re: site provided accessibility control interfaces:

Hi All

> Feel free to try it out if you can struggle with spanish at 
> http://www.sidar.org/recur/usuar/nav/editorcss/index.php - feedback is 
> welcome, but please be aware that this is an alpha being released for 
> people who like trying things that are likely to still have bugs.

I tried, I struggled...  Spanish is sufficiently different from French
and Italian to have me thrown!  Will look again in the light of the
morning because I'm interested in this sort of thing.

The community directory that I'm working on at the moment has a
user-changeable style sheet.  Basically, it's a Perl CGI programme that
generates a style sheet based on parameters fed to it as a query string.

For example:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="/cc/css?size=normal;scheme=colour;showimages=yes" />

The stylesheet allows font sizes to be changed and different colour
schemes (background vs foreground) to be selected; the showimages
component just determines whether or not to display pictures on the
page.  (This is where pictures are used as 'eye candy' rather than
conveying useful information.)

State preservation is achieved by cookies for session-to-session
preservation of state settings.  For those without cookies, the
appropriate information is passed from page to page (all generated with
Perl) as a query string.

Each 'page' looks for the cookie, checks the query string if it's not
there and just defaults to standard values if not present.

Doing this takes about ten extra lines of Perl, which are the same in
every programme; when posting forms, the 'preserve state string', which
I call $pstrg, is POSTed as a hidden field.  When using standard links,
it's just added as a query string to the end of the URL.

If anyone wants the Perl source, let me know.

Cheers

M


-- 
Matthew Smith
IT Consultant - KBC, South Australia

Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 17:05:06 UTC