Example 1: Style Sheet Switcher

This function is an extreme simplification of the technique employed in Invasion of the Body Switchers (http://alistapart.com/articles/bodyswitchers) by Andy Clarke and James Edwards. It also makes use of John Resig’s addEvent( ) function (http://quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/10/_and_the_winner_1.html) for simple event management. It uses a single external CSS file to handle three different font sizes for the browser. We are going to change the font size of the page by changing a class on the body element.

We start with the external style sheet (switcher.css):

body.normal {
  font-size: 80%;
}
body.large {
  font-size: 100%;
}
body.huge {
  font-size: 150%;
}
h1 {
  font-size: 2em;
}
p {
  font-size: 1em;
}

Then we have our XHTML page, with a link to our CSS file, and a placeholder script referring to our JavaScript file (switcher.js):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title>Switcher Example</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="switcher.css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="switcher.js"></script> </head> <body class="normal"> <div id="content"> <h1>Title</h1> <p>This is a paragraph.</p> <p>This is another paragraph.</p> </div> <div> <form id="switcher_form" ...

Get Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.