CSS

I wrote the following to a friend about a site he has that made it hard to update colors. This is NOTHING new, and probably leaves out other important reasons for doing it, but figured I'd post it anyway.

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you'd said you had gone through or were going through color changes on the site and that was taking quite a bit of time. You might want to talk with you developer about converting the control of colors to either:

1) php variables that can be changed one place or

2) cascading style sheet items/settings

Of the two, the second is preferable long term if the site can be moved to a point where everything is being controlled through CSS. See:

http://www.csszengarden.com

Click on the links -- the content is all the same, the look and feel totally different. Every one of the versions of the site you access through that URL is controlled with CSS. Ultimately, the way to go is to have the entire site look and feel controlled through CSS. One of the first things this means is to NOT use the HTML "table" tag for anything else except real tables of data, insteading using it for layout and formatting (which is how it has been used for years). Some advantages are:

1) Generally reduces the amount of data that needs to be downloaded to render pages

2) Look and feel can be totally changed by changing one file (the CSS) only, thereby staying away from having to muck with code to change the look.

3) Separation of data and look and feel is a good design principle.

4) By separating data from look and feel, it tends to result in data that is better structured and, therefore, may be easier to share with other sites and applications.

The full use of CSS this way is something relatively new. CSS wasn't up to the task for a long time, other approaches were developed and it does take learning to master, but it is being more and more and so there are resources out there.