[Mailman-Developers] Styling patch

[Terri Oda]

On 3-May-07, at 9:03 PM, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> Patch #1415956 from Bryan Carbonnell adds CSS for styling purposes and
> changes the HTML to be valid XHTML1.0.  It still needs some tidying
> up, and it still uses tables for layout, but that patch takes us
> halfway there.

It does look very promising!  I'm a big fan of going to XHTML, and  
given that it sounds like some of the templating systems are going to  
want clean, closed tags, this seems like the best way of keeping our  
options open while still moving forwards.

> It presents one big compatibility issue that will probably need to be
> fixed.  The patch removes the colour settings (WEB_HEADER_COLOR,
> WEB_ERROR_COLOR, WEB_ADMINITEM_COLOR, etc.)  and replaces them with
> CSS class declarations.
>
> It's probably unacceptable to break the use of these settings, so
> there needs to be some compatibility fix.  Colours could be
> substituted into the .css file somehow, or a 'style' attribute could
> be added as well as a 'class' attribute.  Does anyone have suggestions
> for what to do?

Some thoughts with positive (+) and negative (-) notes:

Have the CSS generated by a CGI (which could then use these variables  
if they're available).
- extra processing for each web request
+ could lay groundwork to make it possible to change settings on a  
per-list (or per virt-domain) basis rather than site-wide.

Use a Makefile to generate the CSS once from this file (and leave  
note in file saying that further config is in CSS)
+ processing happens once
- can't be applied easily as a patch, requires an actual rebuild to  
take effect

Use a "style" attribute as well as a "class" one:
+ might make conversion from one type of settings to another easier
- just going to look inexplicable and hackish later, potentially make  
it more awkward to do CSS-only skins

Not clear to me what would be best just yet...

  Terri