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History: CSS Overview

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Presentation

The presentation of elements, the visual style of your theme, is created using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

W3C provides tutorials and other tools for learning CSS principles: www.w3.org/Style/CSS. See also the CSS links in the Directory.

Tiki methodologies

You can either start with an existing theme style sheet and copy, rename and modify it, or you can start with a "blank" CSS file and create the new style from scratch. To start from an existing CSS file, see Modifying an Existing Style Sheet; to start from a blank CSS file, see Starting Fresh — CSS.

Comment from tw.o/StyleCreation

author message
coofercat CSS Bloat!
on: Mon 30 May, 2005
All of the stock CSS files supplied with Tiki are huge! (60K upwards, mostly). That's really big, and mostly unnecessary.

There are two potential solutions:

1) Create "generic" styles

In this scenario, a series of reusable styles would be created. For example, "full width title box", "full width text box" etc. Then, each Tiki application is migrated to using these "supplied" styles, only creating their own if absolutely necessary. Thus, most of the CSS is shared between all of Tiki, with minimal "per-page" additions. The problem is that we'd have to migrate the whole of Tiki to a solution like this for it to be any use.

2) Amalgamate similar styles in the CSS

This is a per-css proposal. Where two applications both use a similar on-screen style, simply use both names in the CSS definition of that style. Thus, where there were two copies of the style there are now only one.

This will shrink the size of the CSS considerably, but it's incredibly difficult to test, because it's not always clear where a style is used (it may say "blog posts" but actually be used somewhere else as well!). Also, it relies on CSS and application authors to be very, very diligent about what they're doing.

So in short, neither scenario is a "quick fix", but in my view, something has to be done because the CSS files are huge and only set to get bigger - not good news for old browsers or mobile/low power devices etc.

my 2 pence worth ;-)

History

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Information Version
Wed 30 of Jun, 2010 06:58 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Some updating. 9
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Sat 23 of May, 2009 05:33 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Updated for Tiki 3.0. 8
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Tue 27 of Jan, 2009 12:28 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Some updating. 7
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Wed 08 of Mar, 2006 04:37 GMT-0000 System Administrator 6
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Thu 23 of Feb, 2006 05:10 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee tw.o origin deleted. 5
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Thu 23 of Feb, 2006 05:09 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Link changes and copy edits. 4
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Mon 20 of Feb, 2006 02:05 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Content added. 3
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Fri 17 of Feb, 2006 07:01 GMT-0000 System Administrator Content added from doc.tw.o. 2
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Fri 17 of Feb, 2006 02:41 GMT-0000 system created from structure 1
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