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Posted by pecan on November 20, 2008, 5:52 am
Please log in for more thread options henry wrote:
> 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'
>
The upshot is that the inserts must not have <header> stuff, CSS links,
or even <BODY> tags... 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
don't (yet) use DW, but I read somewhere recently that there's a setting
in DW which allows you to categorise files as inserts, not full docs.
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