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