Dynamic Extensible Styles

With browser support for Cascading-Style Sheets(CSS) dramatically increasing in the past few years the use of styles in web pages has also dramatically increased. Even though the use of CSS does provide much needed flexibility to web programmers it is still limited and somewhat error prone. A limitation that has effected may developers is its lack of relationships with other elements. For example if you have a style and would like to base other styles on that, it is not possible and there is no easy mechanism to implement this. A framework is needed that will allow developers to create styles and allow other styles to be “derived” from these. If a change is made in the base style then these changes should propagate throughout the “children” of this style. This is exactly what Dynamic Extensible Styles(DES) provides.
Even though CSS does have a property called “inheritance”, it is certainly not inheritance in the sense that Object-Oriented programmers are used to. On many occasions I have encountered the problem that many styles were based on a single style, then that (base) style needed to be changed. The solution was to find all styles based on it and update those, manually. In these situations the search/replace feature in IDE’s have been invaluable. As style use continues to grow the frequency for this problem to arise will indeed grow as well. Using DES a change can update any number of styles automatically without looking for a single style that has been based on the changed style.

For more details see the documents in the Documents & Files page for this project.