December 2005
Intermediate to advanced
468 pages
9h 12m
English
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Chapter 2. Web Design
Hacks 3–10: Introduction
This chapter provides user interface hacks that you can perform with HTML using PHP. The hacks cover building tabs and boxes to clean up your web interface, building interface elements like breadcrumb trails, and building lightweight HTML graphs. The chapter even includes a hack that shows you how to send HTML email to your customers.
Create a Skinnable Interface
Use CSS to allow your user to select how your web application should look.
Have you ever run across a user who just has to have every blog he reads appear in his own personal color scheme? Are you that kind of user? Thankfully, supporting these users is far easier with CSS support in modern browsers.
CSS defines the fonts, colors, sizes, and even positions of elements of a page independent of the HTML code for that page. You can change the look of a single HTML page drastically simply by redefining its CSS stylesheet. This hack shows how to provide user-selectable CSS and offers some advice on creating customizable interfaces.
The Code
Start out by saving the code in Example 2-1 as index.php.
Example 2-1. Simple index page that sets the stage for customizable
CSS
<html> <head> <?php $style = "default"; if ( $_GET["style"] ) $style = $_GET["style"]; $files = array(); $dh = opendir( "styles" ); while( $file = @readdir( $dh ) ) { if( preg_match( "/[.]css$/", $file ) ) { $file = preg_replace( "/[.]css$/", "", $file ); $files []= $file; } } ?> <style type="text/css" media="all">@import ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.