[MACCAWS] a little off topic - need help with DreamWeaver MX and CSS cascad e

All,

I know this is a little off-topic - but hopefully just a little - but I have
a question regarding DreamWeaver MX and standards and haven't been able to
find anything online about this.


At my job we use DreamWeaver because we have a lot of non-programmer content
experts who need to make web content. I programmed the templates and they
put their content in.  These templates are really default starting points.
As the populators create pages based on these templates they can move things
around. (using DreamWeaver's "editable" comment tags). (These templates are
really multi-media applications (using DHTML) and so they do employ some
absolute positioning).

Wanting to use good web design I put all the style information in external
stylesheets (including positioning info). In DreamWeaver 4 (which most
people are using at my work) when you make changes to a style, rather than
rewriting the information in the external stylesheet it just adds a style
attribute to the effected element and puts the new values there (relying on
the CSS cascade to give the local values higher priority).  This works great
for the following scenario - if the populator created 10 pages based off the
1 template, and then had to change some style information in 1 specific
page, the other 9 still got the value from the external stylesheet, but the
1 had the "local definition" of that one specific rule/value. (So the
external stylesheet was the "default values" for all pages based on that
template and page specific tweaks existed in the page)

Now comes Dreamweaver MX. It has improved stylesheet capabilities including
that it works better with external stylesheets (This is a good thing!).  Now
if a style is specified in an external stylesheet, and the user makes a
modification in the page, it modifies the external stylesheet.

Here's my problem though - I need the cascade. Now, when my populator
creates 10 pages based off a template and needs to use the default values in
9 of 10 but also has to make a page specific tweak for the last 1 page, it
changes the external stylesheet and the other 9 are now changed.

Is there a way to get DreamWeaver MX to use the cascade so that rather than
rewriting the value in my master external stylesheet, it will do something
else, such as auto-generating a page-specific external stylesheet, or
creating a style block in the specific page where the local value goes (or
if nothing else, writing inline styles with style attributes)?

I know I can't be alone in this - there  will be others who want to generate
multiple pages based off a template for their site, have a master stylesheet
for that template (or even just a master site wide stylesheet), but then
have 1 or 2 pages that need to make some tweaks to a given style and want to
use the CSS Cascade to write a "local" value and not wreck it for all the
other pages.

Some more specifics about my problem - I have various "controls" that the
user clicks that will swap graphics (change the src of a given graphic),
swap the txt in a given layer, start audio and video clips, etc.  These
controls are absolutely positioned and as such I have used ID selectors on
their containing <div> elements. The populators are therefore not applying
styles to these controls as they go, they are "predefined" by the master
stylesheet for that template.

Is there a way in DreamWeaver MX to get this to work?  Any help would be
greatly appreciated. 

Jeff Moyes
Multimedia Programmer
Allen Communication Learning Services, 
a division of Mentergy U.S.A.
ph: 801.799.7231
fax: 801.537.7805
[email protected]

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get 128 Bit SSL Encryption!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/JjlUgA/vN2EAA/kG8FAA/7j9qlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/