Dynamic Cascading Style Sheets

Dynamic CSS, or DCSS, is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies used together to create dynamic style sheets, by using a combination of any server-sided programming language (such as PHP/ASP/Perl/JSP) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The first idea of DCSS was written in July 2002 by Jori Koolstra, a Dutch programmer.[1]

DCSS allows you to work with variables in CSS and dynamic rewriting of CSS source. Many content management systems have created additional modules, for example Drupal.[2] Sass and Less can be used as dynamic stylesheet languages.

Example with PHP

Typically a web page using DCSS is set up in three files. A file that holds the CSS variables, a .php file that echos the CSS content and the web page where the CSS is needed.

A .dcss file normally looks like this.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>DCSS example</title>

    <style type="text/css">
      <?php
         /* Include the style sheet */
         require_once("sheet.dcss.php");
      ?>
    </style>

  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

The included .dcss.php file. Notice that a dcss file always has a .php extension.

<?php
  /* Include the variables file */
  require_once("vars.php");

  echo "p";
  echo "{";
  echo "font-family:    \"$FONT_TYPE\";";
  echo "}";
?>

And the file that holds the variables for the dcss.php file (often called vars.php).

<?php
  $FONT_TYPE = "Courier New";
?>

See also

References

  1. Koolstra, Jori (2 July 2002). "Dynamic CSS". Retrieved 18 July 2010.
  2. ceardach (3 March 2010). "Dynamic CSS". Drupal. Retrieved 27 January 2011.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, February 06, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.