Can an external css contain text?

[mariko]

I have text that is repeated on multiple web pages. I don't want to edit all of them every time I want to change the text. Is there a way to use css so that I only have to change it in one place?

[TheServant]

Why do you have anything besides CSS in your external CSS file? It's not recommended to do things this way, and I cannot see why every file (particularly external files) would need the same text?

Please explain what you're trying to do or the limitations, so maybe we can suggest a better approach.

[mariko]

Here's what I want to do. On a few of my pages I have a panel labeled newspanel in my css. All my css does is designate an area, the backround color, border, etc... I use HTML to write in the titles whatever news the client wants on there and hyperlinks to my news page. It really isn't a big deal for me to go to each page and keep everything updated.

Does this makes more sense than my last post?

[zorgi]

If I understood correctly, than you need centralised system to update multiple pages in one go. You can not use css for that. You will need some server side scripting.

[tur130]

I have a requirement that may be solved by the answer to this thread - so will follow here before posting separately.

I want to create a web site with multiple pages that one can think of as sections to a large document. What I also want is a web page that is simply the concatenation of the other web pages. (I may want more than one actually differing only by the order in which the concatenation is done)

I know you can do this with server based code – but it ought to be possible to do this just using a browser that can ‘see’ the separate files that need to be concatenated.

Other’s claim this can’t be done since each page has its own styles, scripts etc. so how would the concatenated page know how to apply them. In my case I can design all of the pages to avoid conflicting styles and unless the solution requires it avoid the use of scripts.

[mariko]

So....If I want to learn how to do things like that I should dig into the PERL book I have on my shelf? Is that what you're talking about? I don't know much server scripting but if I now have an excuse to learn it I will.

[JKing]

There are number of server-side scripting languages you could and yes PERL is one of them. Some others are ASP/ASP.net, PHP, Ruby, Java Server Pages or Cold Fusion.

I would recommend having a look at PHP if you are new to scripting. It is less cryptic than some of the other languages and it's open source and completely free to use.

[mariko]

Thanks everyone! I've dabbled in PERL a little and I love it so I'll get to learning it.

[tur130]

Mariko - looks like you are sorted - I'll re-post my requirement as a separate thread.