digitalpoint
Well-known member
The nice thing is you can leave image based CSS definitions which will automatically be used by the browsers that don't understand CSS gradients (Internet Explorer basically).
Cant you just have one mega CSS Sprite?
- Thread starter Lone Wolf
- Start date
Erik
Well-known member
That's nice - I haven't really messed around with CSS3 gradients as thorough support has only recently evolved. Eventually I would like to see a whole colorspace system built into XenForo so I could do something like this:
Code:
.myButton {
background: {xen:linear-gradient '{H:@primaryHue, S:0, V:250} -> {H:@primaryHue, S:10, V:230}'}
}
.someOtherElement {
border-color: {xen:color '{H:@primaryHue, S:45, V:145}'}
}Where you can define a linear-gradient completely dynamically, as well as basic colors. In this case the entire theme could be dynamically colored just by changing the value of the style property @primaryHue. And if it's possible to make @primaryHue a user-preference-defined style property, users could make the theme of your site any color they want just by dragging a slider or selecting a hue value in their personal control panel. The possibilities are limitless, really.
I've already sort of accomplished this functionality by using transparent gradients throughout my Flexile theme and then defining the background color as a style-property-defined hex color. Board owners can then make the color of the theme any color they want by dragging the hue slider in the control panel, which changes the hues of all the colors in that style property group. Full functionality like this would be amazing though.
Who knows, maybe I'll take this up as my summer project and create a mod if this functionality doesn't look like it's going to be implemented.
Erik
Well-known member
Or this. Only thing is it would be rather expensive to compile the whole thing at runtime, and I don't really think any of the other features are needed, seeing as we already have variables with style properties.
It doesn't need to be compiled when served, it could conceivably be compiled and minified after alterations just like it is now with the XenForo template syntax, much like the Ruby on Rails asset pipeline. I don't particularly care about Haml (although it would work), but CoffeeScript and SASS/SCSS would be nice to have support for. The reason SASS/SCSS would be nice is for mixin support, and CoffeeScript would be nice just because JavaScript has so many rough edges 
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Erik
Well-known member
Sorry, but I absolutely hate the idea of mixins. I can't imagine the nightmare of having follow a trail of mixins to get to the actual CSS that you're looking for. CSS doesn't need to be that complicated in my opinion.It doesn't need to be compiled when served, it could conceivably be compiled and minified after alterations just like it is now with the XenForo template syntax, much like the Ruby on Rails asset pipeline. I don't particularly care about Haml (although it would work), but CoffeeScript and SASS/SCSS would be nice to have support for. The reason SASS/SCSS would be nice is for mixin support, and CoffeeScript would be nice just because JavaScript has so many rough edges
Whereas you can do everything you want without mixins (just with a little bit more work), it is impossible to do some stuff without variables and color functions.
Regardless of SCSS/no SCSS, one feature I would really like to see get implemented is the ability to designate any style property as user-controlled. This style property would be left as a variable to be used at runtime and not compiled in like all the other style properties, and would then show up in a forum user's control panel under a "style options" page. This would allow the user to change font face, size, background color, background images, etc. to their desire. While it has the ability to be misused, it opens up a lot of possibilities that currently have to be either hacked in through the use of JavaScript and cookies, or fulfilled by mods.
DRE
Well-known member
Hmmm. K say you have 500 smilies and you separate them into 5 different sprite-sheets. Is that better than having 1 sprite-sheet for 100 images and the 400 that are left are individual images instead of 4 other sprite-sheets for the remainding images?
