Professional DevExpress™ ASP.NET Controls

Chapter 10. Using Themes, CSS, and JavaScript for Customizations and Enhancements

In twenty years of consulting I have worked on projects that had budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars to the tens of millions of dollars at some of the smallest to some of the largest and best known companies in the world. At all but the smallest of these projects — and in my books and articles — I have preached the value of specialization. From Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and my experiences, specialization increases efficiencies substantially. Unfortunately younger industries start with generalists and it takes many business generations to get to the point of specialization. Thus even on the projects with extraordinary budgets there were always plenty of programmers, some DBA types, a manager or two, and occasionally testers. Designated and trained architects were rare, real Web designers were very rare, and CSS and script specialists were nonexistent. Generally, for every job that needed to be done, if it wasn't project management work, then the programmers had to do it, including creating style sheets and writing script.

Not to take anything away from programmers who really know CSS or script, knowing something and specializing in it, or better still, being an expert, are completely different things.

This chapter is provided as a quick reference. This chapter is not a comprehensive missive on CSS and JavaScript because it is possible to fill entire bookshelves on these subjects. Instead ...