Learn how to customize BrainKing's view layer and share your CSS experiences.
Useful links Wikipedia - for general information on what CSS is, why it is useful, and a short introduction on how to use it. W3Schools - for a tutorial and a reference on CSS. W3C - for detailed and advanced information for those who are interested. CSS Zen Garden - for some trickery and demonstration of what is possible with CSS
Ok, now that everybody can include external stylesheets, everybody that would like to have the old style might set this option to "http://toedder.net/bk/brainking.css" to see if you are happy with it.
I didn't do everything 100% like it was before, but concentrated on the main issues like the color of the Main Page's lists and so on. It should be very familiar, even though I kept good changes that were made in the last time like the tabbed appearance on profile-, settings- and other pages.
Fencer: I wonder how many of those 3572 castle users have no idea you can change style (since castle is the default). Did you keep statistics of which styles people used in the past? If so, one can figure out how many of the castle users have actually tried out the other styles.
Hrqls: Thank you :) I was just about to do that, but I am not sure. I thought and think it would be better and more trustful to have those user styles hosted on BrainKing.com instead of having them cluttered over various third party sites. At least styles that were so commonly requested like the classic BK theme. Otherwise many people would rely on my little site for this style, and if I once forgot to pay my bills, it might even be gone .
I think the option to link to external styles is great for testing them, and even for introducing them to the crowd, discuss and perhaps alter them, according to the critics you might get. But I don't think it would be too smart to use this method permanently for including custom styles.
But in the end, this is Fencer's decision and perhaps he can lighten our minds up: Do you plan to include those user committed styles in another way than by linking to them, i.e. might there be more options in the settings?
Gordon Shumway: Yes, I do. When a style is finished and works with no problems on all major web browsers (Firefox, IE 7, Opera), I will add it to the BrainKing repository and everyone will be able to set it on the Settings page.
I have a question about that: How will styles be maintained?
I tested mine with all 3 browsers you mentioned, and it seemed to work as intended on all of them. But today, you made some - reasonable - changes to the right hand column, which caused the text-align to be converted to center. I didn't understand it, but fixed it immediately. This was pretty easy because I still have direct access to my stylesheet and the changes are immediately available to everybody who uses the sheet. But if the style was hosted on BrainKing.com without me having access to it, such changes would have been made by you, meaning you had to check out every page in every style to be sure they all still work.
This seems to lead to the conclusion that the best would be to have some authoring system for stylesheets. In other words: that stylesheets, even after being included in the BrainKing style repository, would be maintained by either their author or some other maintainer.
Gordon Shumway: *nod* sounds logical .. i wont post the link on there either :) .. people interested will come to this board and find it here to test it and test their own preferences :)