CSS Based Design

[jonathan lall]

Good call serving proper MIMEs only to proper browsers; I did the same with an ultra-simple script. Glad to see other people are too. I also have a style-switcher, which I also wrote myself but derived "inspiration" from the aformentioned A List Apart. As for mod_rewrites, I never did take the time to learn them. I started reading about mod_rewrite a while back and there was so much that I was overwhelmed and just forgot about it--simple stuff is easy, but what I want to do isn't. Anybody know of anywhere with a concise paper on mod_rewrite?

[jhnphm]

This guide assumes knowledge of regular expressions.
IThe mod_rewrites on my local copy of the site (out of date by two months, and I stripped out redundant statements that weren't needed because of the usage of the <base> element) and commented are:

 #Syntax is "RewriteRule [URL RegExp] [Replacement with optional back references [[Flags]]"

 RewriteRule ^/$ /robotics/ [R,L]
 #Redirects http://localhost/ to http://localhost/robotics
 #R flag redirects, L prevents fall through to statements below

 RewriteRule ^/robotics/pages/(.+)$ /robotics/index.php?file=pages/$1.inc [L]
#Using W3 recommended URIs, which makes it more difficult to rewrite URIs, since there is the problem of what to rewrite to. This has been solved by dumping all pages under the /robotics/pages directory, and use the <base> element to shift the initial path for relative URIs to just /robotics/ . All the "pages" are files with the .inc extension which are included into PHP. The scripts filter for the .inc extension for security purposes.

[HFWang]

My rewrite file looks like the following...

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^images(.*)$ images$1 [S=1]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$      ?path=$1 [L,NS,QSA]

Just so you know, this rewrites EVERYTHING. The rewrite rule for images marks the image folder as being directed to that folder (and then skipping the following rule, so it doesn't run into the other rewrite). This way everything is passed into your CMS and it can handle everything for you.

I then wrote a custom CMS solution for the site that could then parse $_GET['path'] and return the appropriate page...

[jhnphm]

Just added a style switcher at the bottom of our page. 188 has a nice website. In retrospect our website's navigation is rather bad.

[RyanIdium]

try http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp .

[JohnBoucher]

Brandon,
That's a great list. Lots of good info there. If I may, I have two to add...

#1 The Zen Garden . This really awakened me to to POWER of CSS. Click on the designs on the right side of the page, They will load up different CSS files using the same html file. Really cool.

#2 Webmaster World . This is a News and Discussion for the Independent Web Professional site. It is a great community forum like Chiefdelphi dedicated to web issues. It's free to register for the public side. There are forums dedicated to all web subjects including a terrific CSS forum. Post a question and someone will toss out an answer. There is a non-public side, that deals with the business side of the web that makes really interesting reading. It's good community, very much like we have here.

jb