Simplified CSS

I'm gonna let Paul respond to this :)

The classes / ids I'm thinking of are basically along the lines of existing HTML markup -- i.e. H1-H6 for headings. 

for example:
H1                       -- can be for the page heading / site title &c. (as is already done)
H2  and THEAD TH -- can be for subheadings / table heads
H3  and TBODY TH -- can be for forum topics and  subsubheadings
  ... and so on.

but you get the idea.  Obviously there are things that need separate classes, e.g. left/right floats, div's containing the header / navbar / forum, topic and post levels / body / footers, but not too many.  I don't think that this would be much of a rewrite from the PHP side, since the XHTML is already well formed, but from the CSS side, the effort could be a bit more substatial.

This would make skinning the whole site with a simple stylesheet much easier.  I also wonder what the board looks like in less-educated browsers like IE (some people use it -- often without realising!).  Does anyone have an estimate for how many classes and ids there are in the current development code?

It's good to know you're testing it thoroughly!

Yes, I would agree with that.. the classic example would be to have alternate lines in a table.  I was more concerned with the sheer quantity of classes/id I would need to write styles for.  I was hoping for a substantially boiled down version, with more consistency / intuitity (?sp) with the tag names.

I would say if the styles were simplified, you would end up with a design that was less flexible.  But then how much flexibility does one need? I think that the current level of flexibilty is overwhelming and unworkable.

I'll look forward to seeing this!  Is there a public RCS repository somewhere?  I would be willing to help with this apsect if you like.

1. A lot of people will just want to alter the colour scheme and nothing else. It therefore makes sense to have all the colours in one easy to edit stylesheet.

2. Most people won't want to bother with the stuff in base.css so it is easier to seperate it out rather than complicating the main stylesheets.

Pual I love you , you are so smart!

One thing that should be remembered is that the stylesheets are done this way because this is the way I thought was best. Other people will have different views. In the end the purpose of the stylesheet is simply to apply styles to the tags that exist. There is nothing stopping people from tearing up the existing stylesheets and starting again with their own.

On a more general note. The way that css is applied to 1.2 is rather different to 1.1. In 1.1 styles were created to perform a particular task e.g. align something top/right and give the element a background colour. In 1.2 the classes and id's really do no more than identify particular elements. The classes and id's can then be used to do whatever you like with the undelying markup. For anybody having difficulty, the most important thing to learn is how to use descendant selectors which will allow you to style just about any individual board element.

TIP OF THE DAY.

If you are finding a particular selector does not seem to be doing what you wanted remember specificity. This is not strictly accurate but works in most cases

id = 100
class = 10
tag = 1

So #myid(100) DIV(1).myclass(10) = 111
To overrule it somewhere else you would need DIV(1)#myid(100) DIV(1).myclass(10) = 112

basically i think you add up the numbers and the bigger the number the more important that setting is e.g. id is the most important setting so a id setting would override the class setting (i think)

they are just numbers for all ids, classes, and tags its just a simple way of working out which settign with be dominant