On 30 Nov 00 at 19:41, Gerry Hickman wrote:
A d/b-driven system would also make it much easier to roll out layout
changes, which can be a real pain on a static system.
I currently use a single CSS file to format all six of my MHonArc
archives. This means I can change the layout of thousands of pages
by changing a few lines in a text file. None of the HTML needs to
be changed or uploaded to the server. The page just renders with
the new settings next time the user visits the archive or hits
"refresh".
Hi Gerry
I use CSS too, but it's far from a dream solution: no single browser
supports 100% of even CCS1 (though IE4.5/Mac come very close), and
many browsers are pretty flaky on it -- Netscape 4 is probably the
worst culprit, interpreting CSS in weird buggy ways rather than
ignoring it if it can't do the job properly.
I don't want to restrict access to my archives to the minority of my
users who are equipped with IE5+, so I use pretty minimal CSS, with
the result that the pages are still reasonably similar on a
vanilla HTML3.2 browser -- see
http://www.pfc.org.uk/pfclists/news-arc/
Others may prefer to abndon users of older browers: I'm not, because
they are too high a proportion of my readers.
But I think there's a more fundamental flaw in your logic: even with
100% CSS support, you can't use CSS to tweak all the features of an
archive. CSS won't determine which elements are there, just how they
are presented. No amount of CSS will add navigation buttons to an
archive which doesn't have them, or site-wide navigation tools to a
page which has omitted them.
Best wishes,
Claire
--
Claire McNab -- Claire(_at_)siberia(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk
