History: CSS Overview
Preview of version: 6
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 😉 | |