Developers of Sympa

["Mark F. Heiman" <address@concealed>]

Francis is absolutely right -- this is a big step in the right 
direction.  However, to really take advantage of what style sheets can 
offer, you need to move _all_ of your formatting out of the XHTML and 
into the style sheets.  No inline styles, no strong tags, nothing but 
structure in your XHTML.

The best way to do this is to review your interface and identify all of 
the different text and block styles that you want to make use of, and 
assign a class to each of them, based on their function in the 
interface.  Then review those classes and identify similar styles that 
could be merged or simplified through cascading.  Once you've 
identified the minimum set of classes that you need, it will be quick 
work to apply them to your design.  This approach will also help to 
enforce a consistency to the interface, and help you resist the urge to 
style every page element uniquely.

There are a couple of principles that will make your style sheets easy 
for others to work with:

- Try to have structural classes rather than decorative classes; that 
is, don't define classes based on the appearance that they give, but in 
terms of the interface element that they define. The sample style sheet 
that you're working with has a mix of both, and may not be the best 
example to start from.

- Use cascading styles to separate interface-wide attributes from 
element-specific attributes.  If someone wants to redefine the 
appearance of all the links in the interface, they ought to be able to 
change that style in one place rather than having to search out all the 
different places where you've styled an anchor tag. It's not always 
possible to achieve that completely, but it's a good goal.

Pages designed this way will be very easy for others to customize, and 
will greatly increase the appeal of Sympa to people considering 
adopting it.  I'm sure there are a lot of people on this list who are 
willing to help you get the CSS implemented well. It's great to see 
Sympa headed in this direction.


Mark F. Heiman
Information Technology Services
Carleton College

On Feb 22, 2005, at 10:05 AM, Francis Lachapelle wrote:

> This is a great improvement from the default skin! However, I would 
> suggest to simplify your CSS; too much different colors, too much 
> different font sizes! You should also move all of the text properties 
> to your CSS file instead of specifying them in your XHTML.