[boost] Re: Front page, new one..

From: Reece Dunn (msclrhd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-23 05:45:09

Caleb Epstein wrote:
> Several individuals (Rene, Reece, Daniel et al)  have proposed bold
> and interesting designs, all (?) of which use CSS-based layout.  It
> seems like it ought to be possible to have a Boost home page where the
> layout was selectable.  Along the lines of:
> 
> http://www.csszengarden.com/
> 
> http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/official/
> 
> This is some pretty amazing stuff.  Beautiful, minimally intrusive,
> web design.  There are some "angry fruit salads" as well, but overall
> its amazing what can be done with pure CSS.
> 
> The default style is clearly the one that most people will look at all
> of the time, so it should be carefully chosen and designed, but it
> should be simple for users to change the appearance of the site if
> they so desire.

It is possible to add multiple named link/stylesheets in a HTML 
document, so it is possible to switch layout. There are a few drawbacks 
to this:

* Mozilla handles the multiple CSS by treating them as distinct style 
groupings and allows you to switch between them (this is what you want 
:)). However, IE behaviour is to apply the stylings for *all* the 
stylesheets in the order they are given, which means that the resulting 
style is a mix and match affair.

* There isn't a clean way to persist a users style choice when viewing 
the homepage several times and across different pages (if we translate 
the style over to other pages). The way that csszengarden works is to 
use "?cssfile=" in the URL and process that (via some sort of scripting 
mechanism).

> Should we be boiling down some of this discussion to the "Elements of
> Style" and how they should be laid out?

I don't know. Maybe we could come up with several good designs 
(standard, wiki, etc.)

I am moving in this direction, having separated out the common styling 
into a boost-core.css file that I am importing in both boost.css 
(standard) and wiki.css (wiki-style). It is easy to add more to that list.

Regards,
Reece