I'm thinking one base stylesheet, and then a style tag in every page's header with the font, either immediately before or after the base stylesheet (however that works, I can never remember).

I'm thinking of a consistent mechanism to handle all the available styles, though. Can all the scenarios be handled the same way? Because I think we should prioritise the ones that can be abstracted and handled with a system.

I like systems.

Are you thinking customizable stylesheets, but limited to a set of choices? Or fully customizable? For example, fonts: Would we give folks a list of possible font sets to choose from, or could they type in whatever font they wanted?

If it's the latter, you may need user-specific stylesheets. If it's the former, then we could set up a stack of stylesheets for however many permutations we need. But that could get messy if we allow more than a few elements to be user-definable.

Actually, the more I think about it, if you want a system, then the easiest thing might be user-specific stylesheets.

Why not just a small set of alternate style sheets?

That's the scenario I'm thinking of, Tom. I'm just wondering how much we can keep in common (the base file), and then cascade another file on top of that. I get how you can change a previously defined style with a second sheet, but can you erase it?

It's a shame we didn't get the XSLT thing going. Maybe later.

We don't need to erase. There can be a second stylesheet that acts as the default for all the changeable stuff. If you want to have the ability to "erase" a style, leave it off of the main sheet, put it in the second default sheet, but exclude it from an alternate choosable second sheet.

As good points go, that's very.

And I guess they don't have to be in fixed order, right? I mean, if you want to set a large font basis, you still want the relative font sizes (which I assume would be kept) applied afterwards ...

I should probably just hit up w3c.

By relative size, you mean like if someone uses t font size="-3" in a post? Those will definitely work correctly.

t edit Never mind -- I get your point. As long as you are defining different elements within a style in two different sheets (e.g. font name in one sheet and font size in another), it doesn't matter what order the sheets are in.

No, I meant how we have styles now like:

h1 { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 36px; font-style: normal ; color: #990000}
.biggertext { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal}
.smallertext { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal}
.nametext { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold}

Will we have to hand calculate the 36 for every variant base size, or can H1 be a relative size to the body text, and we just tweak the body?

I should probably just hit up w3c.

Or the CSS-Discuss wiki. I found it better for finding what I needed at work when I still was doing CSS stuff for that.

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