Re: [Bodington-developers] CSS and Colours in Bodington

[Jon M. <jo...@te...>]

Now I've had my tea I'll try and describe the plan that I have for my 
own application;

I will have document files as XHTML delivered by Apache in the normal way.

They will all reference a virtual XSL style file (not CSS) via a URL 
that maps
to a CGI script or Servlet or whatever using the extra path information 
in the
URL to specify the same directory that the original document is in.

There will be an XML file in the same directory as the document that 
describes
some colours and dimensions with informaiton about how these can be 
transformed.
And there will also be an XSL file.  Each user will have a user 
directory which
will contain another XML file with user options defined in it.

The CGI script or servlet or whatever will use an XSLT file to transform 
the documents'
XSL file using the current document data file and the user preferences 
file. The resulting
transformed XSL file will be cached in the user's directory and sent to 
the browser which
it can be used to style the XHTML file. Obviouly if the CGI script (or 
whatever) detects
that the cached file is newer than the three input files it will just 
send it without
regenerating it.

I'm saying CGI or Java or whatever because  most work would be done by 
XSLT. 
The work could be integrated into Bodington quite easily - you'd just 
need to make
templates to ask the users for preferences and output that as XML 
preferences files
according to the DTDs that I devise.

I'm going to do this for my own purposes probably starting mid-April.  
It's for use on my
own web site and I wasn't planning to distribute it but I'd be willing 
to sell it to bodington.org
after I and you have tested it for distribution under the open source 
license.

Jon