Quote:
Folks:
>
As a follow-up to my recent posts, I want to ask some more general questions
about multiple instances of a CSS link in a page as seen by browsers due to
server-side file inclusion. Let me set up my question by providing skeleton
code for two files:
>
Here's a skeleton of "index.php":
>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<link href="TheSiteWideStyles.css" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css">
....
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
....
<?php
if ($a == 1) { require("ContentChunk1.html"); }
elseif ($a == 2) { require("ContentChunk2.html"); }
elseif ($a == 3) { require("ContentChunk3.html"); }
...
else { require("ContentChunkDefault.html"); }
endif;
?>
...
</body>
</html>
>
Here's a skeleton of all the content chunk files:
>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<link href="TheSiteWideStyles.css" rel="stylesheet"
type="text/css">
....
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
>
In other words, the chunks are just normal HTML files.
>
I'm showing a naive computation of which content chunk to include, but that
isn't important for my questions.
>
Question 1: What's the best way of describing this design, in which the
index page determines the basic site appearance, and specific "inner"
content is selected by a computation at load time? (Sorry, I'm self-taught
and working alone, and I don't always get the terminology right.)
>
Note that linkage to the site-wide CSS file occurs in all files. Why? At
least in the authoring environment I'm using, Dreamweaver CS3, that's the
only way to make the site-wide styles available to all pages. (DW experts
will realize there's a "weasel clause" to this; I'll get to that in a
moment.)
>
Question 2: Do other authoring environments handle this differently,
perhaps more cleverly?
>
Please: I've heard "Don't use DreamWeaver!" too many times already, so
there is no need to repeat it.
>
Wen index.php is loaded, one of the chunks will be included and client will
see two, (repeat, 2) identical css link tags. When I test the page,
validator.w3.org flags this as an error. Well, no sense in confusing
browsers by sending them invalid code -- some are already confused enough as
it is, right?
>
Question 3: I think designs based on such an include scheme are very
common. In general, how is this issue avoided -- or, do those page simply
fail the validation test -- or do people not use external css as much as
they should?
>
DW actually provides a workaround for this issue, a mechanism called
"Design-Time Style Sheets". You can externally mark a specific css link in
a particular file as being valid only at design time. As a result, that
tag is filtered out before the file is uploaded to the server. If I use
that feature and if I eliminate all the header and trailer material in my
content chunks, leaving only stuff that's inside <html>... </html>, all my
pages pass w3c validation. (Woo-Hoo!) But I'm concerned that this
mechanism is a bit fragile in practice.
>
Question 4: Am I missing something completely obvious that would achieve
the same result without all this trouble? Again, I'm self-taught and I
could be completely oblivious to better ways to do this.
>
Question 5: Is there a better place to post this question?
>
TIA,
>
Henry
>
remove 'zzz'
>
or even <BODYtags... it must be just the inserted code. You do not
need to validate each insert, only validate the generated code.
I had a similar issue lately when I was working on a Wordpress site. I
in DW which allows you to categorise files as inserts, not full docs.
