From: khaines@...
Date: 2007-03-23T03:21:33+09:00
Subject: Re: eRuby and CSS

On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, John Joyce wrote:

> I basically want to have a CSS preprocessor, server-side of course. (I'd 
> actually like CSS3 to be finished and widespread, but that's like watching 
> rocks grow)
> This looks interesting. Perhaps.
> It's on the right track with variables to substitute in for commonly used 
> values. That's one of the big things lacking in CSS now. But it doesn't seem 
> as simple as it should/could be.
>
> But perhaps the best approach is building my own ERb solution and using 
> something with Rails API AssetTagHelper from rails/actionpack/ 
> action_view/helpers/asset_tag_helper.rb
> stylesheet_link_tag(*source)
> piped through ERb?
> Need to sit down with it later!

I have a DSL for CSS that makes variable substitution and so much more 
really easy, by writing ruby code that, for the most part, looks a lot 
like the CSS that is generated by it.


font_color = '#001382'
border_style = '3 px ridge #a0e0b0'
Media.screen {
   body {
     font {
       size 15.px
       color font_color
       family :verdana
     }
     background_color '#ececff'

   Id.header {
     border border_style
     padding 1.em
   }
}

It supports the full range of CSS1..3 selectors as well as intelligent 
caching of the generated CSS -- given conditional logic such as a check to 
see if the browser is an IE version prior to IE7, one can have it generate 
different CSS, and those different versions of the generated CSS will be 
cached.

This is written for use with the IOWA web framework, but I could be 
convinced to release this as a standalone microproject that also included 
support as a rails plugin or whatever might be necessary for other 
frameworks.


Kirk Haines