Comments on: Build Your Site With Dynamic CSS

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:49:24 +0000

As long as we're editing the header to specify the content type, why not also set Cache-control: no-cache?

Should fix the problem, provided the server allows it and the browser supports it. Not sure how often that's the case though.

By: ganesh

ganesh — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:48:26 +0000

great CSS u implemented

thanxxxxxx a lot for sharing

By: Eric Bannatyne

Eric Bannatyne — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:26:12 +0000

That sounds like an interesting technique. But are you constantly writing to mystyles.css? If so, that might not be extremely efficient. I'm not sure...

But you have a very interesting idea, it sounds like you could make something great out of that!

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:52:04 +0000

Hey Eric, your idea is innovative, clever and thought provoking. Kudos all around to you! Nifty. :)

I wanted your feedback about a technique I used to do something similar on a corporate web server.

I link to one CSS file (mystyles.css). Copies of other CSS files that alter the style and format of the site are stored in the same web directory, but with a .txt extension. I use PHP to then copy the contents of the needed CSS style file from the relevant .txt CSS file, overwriting 'mystyles.css' as needed. When the user refreshes their browser, the new CSS styles would be picked up. I chose this convoluted way since we work in a large team system, and I wanted the other users to be able to change the style without using much programming. I'll probably blog on this when I get my blog set up back again.

Nice blog by the way Eric!

Best regards, Ryan.

By: Eric Bannatyne

Eric Bannatyne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:28:08 +0000

Yes, you could do that as well! The possibilities are infinite :)

By: Christian Vermeulen

Christian Vermeulen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:22:30 +0000

Yeah, i just figured that you could probably give GET variables through the link src as well...

By: Eric Bannatyne

Eric Bannatyne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:18:44 +0000

Yes, that could be a little problem. I hadn't thought about that!

I'll have to try your idea out sometime :)

By: Eric Bannatyne

Eric Bannatyne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:17:45 +0000

Hmm, I like the idea of getting the colours from a database!

By: Eric Bannatyne

Eric Bannatyne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:16:45 +0000

Good idea :)

By: Christian Vermeulen

Christian Vermeulen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:14:28 +0000

Wauw! I've always missed the use of PHP in my stylesheets!
I had never imagined it could be this simple!

Other ways of using it?
- include only the segments needed for the particular page.
- calculation of needed sizes
- load entire color profiles out of a database (templates?)

Thank you very much for this article!