Personal CSS - creating and updating

• · List available CSS
• · Preview page
• · View system CSS
• · CSS help

System CSS files

The Library has four CSS files, two of which are used at any one time. Which two depends on what section of the Library you are in. The four CSS files are:

As you can see, library.css always comes first, followed by a CSS file for the specific section

Your CSS files

If you create and upload your own CSS files, you can create up to four of them. The CSS files used in each section then become:

You can create any or all of the four files (for example, if you are just restyling the mailing list, you might want to create just [user-name]-mailing-list.css, leaving all other styles unchanged).

You create your files by clicking the Update link above. The Update page offers you a set of template files with all the styles commented out. Make whatever changes you want, and the click either Publish Publicly or Publish Privately .

Public and private publication of personal CSS

If you publish your CSS Publicly then any other Library user can see your CSS on the List available CSS page. They can also switch to using your CSS.

If you publish your CSS Privately then you can use your CSS files, but no one else can. (i.e. the Library won't honor a css=[user-name] for anyone other than yourself).

This doesn't make your CSS codes secret -- the files are easily accessible to any Library visitor, who could take a copy -- it simply stops people viewing the site directly with your CSS files.

Also, if someone is already using your CSS files and you republish them as private, they can continue to use them until they next change their CSS preference.

Licensing

Like the licensing for Zen Garden, we encourage you to provide your CSS under this Creative Commons  license so that others can learn from and build on your work.

If you want other licensing conditions, include them as a comment in each of the personal CSS files you create. Bear in mind that someone may view the site via your publicly published CSS files without ever reading your CSS source. So license conditions that require agreement before using will be ineffective.

Having trouble seeing your changes?

The Preview page exists to show you many of the main Library CSS styles. You can use it to immediately see the effect of changes. You may need to click the appropriate Site section / See as link to see the styles as you intend.

But CSS can be a bit fiddly, and you may not see the changes you were expecting. Check these possibilities:

• You may need to tell your browser to flush its cache, or to refresh the page. CSS files are usually cached by browsers. That's usually a good thing as it saves download time. But not when you are making changes to the file.
• Tiny slips in syntax can mean entire CSS selectors are ignored. You can avoid all the dangerous guessing by validating your CSS: W3C's CSS validator 

Why can't I change....?

Sorry. Some parts of the site have hard-coded CSS styles; and there are even a few remaining stray HTML formatting codes. If you find a bit of code you think should be made more generic or changed in some way, please drop us a Feedback message.

Why the big table?

The main markup for the site is one big HTML table. It has a single row, and two columns: one for the menu, and one for the headings and main content. So why not use a floating DIV for the menus and dump the table?

Good question. The original design did that. But it caused layout difficulties in some browsers. REBOL is available for over 40 platforms, and we'd like this site to be equally available in browsers from all of those platforms. The table design seems to work more widely.

Using images

Want to do it? Please read Using CSS images  first.