Yesterday, I was reviewing the LISTSERV 1.8e web pages and templates
with a list owner who
recently redesigned his employer's web site to incorporate the use of
cascading style sheets. I
had seen both the old site and the new site, and was impressed with the
results of his work.

He suggested moving the contents of the $WWW_STYLE_SHEET_* templates to
external .css
files, cleaning up other templates to move recurring style directives to
the external .css files, and
adding a conditional logic block to the $WWW_ARCHIVE_HEADER template to
specify the
appropriate .css file, based on the current theme. He cited two
potential benefits.

* Seperating style directives from content will make it easier to manage
both the content and the
    style directives. This seems to be the principal benefit, because he
has commented on several
    occasions that his employer's new web site is much easier to
maintain than the old web site.
    When he needs to add or change a page, he can focus solely on the
content. Conversely, he
    can change the "look and feel" of the entire site by changing a
single file.

* The resulting web pages will be smaller and will load faster. This may
not be an issue for those
    of us with gigabit (or faster) processors and broadband connections,
but neither of these are
    ubiquituous.

When I asked whether this change would make it difficult for list owners
to customize the "look
and feel" of their lists' web pages, he explained that style directives
in external .css files are
trumped by top-of-page style directives, and that top-of-page directives
are trumped by in-line
directives on elements in the page. List owners who want to make
stylistic changes on their
lists' web pages could incorporate the appropriate style directives into
the templates for their
lists, thus overriding the directives in the external .css files.

Has anyone attempted this? What problems did you encounter? How did you
address those
problems? Did the results justify the effort?

--
Paul Russell
Senior Systems Administrator
University of Notre Dame