Have someone else apply your (CSS) hacks
posted: August 10th, 2004 · by: Sven
Ok, one thing seems to be common sense … CSS hacks are ugly. But managing different CSS files, one per major browser engine (?), will result in a huuuge amount of additional work, once we have to apply some changes to the layout later on. Argh. I don’t like that stuff at all.
So what?
After having read through some CSS hacks stuff, I came up with the idea to write a simple engine, that takes a standard-compliant CSS sheet and applies the CSS hacks I’d like to have for me.
This way, I could write standard-compliant CSS (one thing, I’m still learning to do) in Firefox, configure my script, run it … and than see, what the site looks like in IE, Opera, Safari etc. I could choose between several CSS hacking strategies and variants and than check out, which one performs best.
Such a tool at hand, this could be done by selecting some options on a website and clicking “Run!”, instead of modifying dozens of cryptic hacked CSS lines by hand, re-calculating widths, borders, paddings etc. all the time. I’d keep working on a “clean”, standard compliant CSS as a source file for the script. The pages would show up in the browser with the hacked, script-output version.
Thinking about this idea, some things popped into my mind …
- Going further, I could build up a web interface, giving other people (with less experience in using php scripts) the possibility to have their CSS sheets hacked also.
- Having the script under an OS licence and having build it up with some plug-interface (or even mini-language) other people (who have some more experience using CSS than me) could even contribute extensions, thus making the script more useful and flexible.
- And once, when the whole stuff rounds up to a stable, useful tool, it could be transformed into plugins for several blogging engines, wikis, cms’ and other frameworks supporting plugins. Wheew. ;)
Cool idea, I thought. Someone must have written that already! I asked Google, the most heavily frequented CSS Guru blogs and CSS ressource pages I know … but I found nothing comparable.
Am I blind?
Any hints are very appreciated. Sometimes I use the wrong keywords and don’t have clue …
In the meanwhile, I’ll start thinking about a bunch of classes, that could set up a useful framework for this script. :)