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CIF : Coding Standards : Use Of Style Sheets
All CIF modules must adhere to the default CIF look and feel which permits cards from different sources to combine with one another in a visually-coordinated way. The default CIF look and feel is designed to permit display within a wide range of wrappers without drawing attention to itself on a design level. CIF modules may optionally use style sheet techniques to change the appearance of CIF modules using site-specific Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) parameter files so long as these site-specific parameters are kept external to the actual CIF cards. Because style sheets are not universally supported by all browsers, and because implementations of style sheet tags are vendor-specific, use of style sheets reduces the effectiveness of CIF modules as a universal display medium. To minimize this impact, CIF standards use a subset of CSS tags which are known to perform robustly on common web browsers now in use. CIF modules are designed to display clearly even if no CSS parameter file is available to them. In such cases they display a default look and feel which is based on an extremely simple and robust subset of HTML. This "failover" mode of CIF will engage automatically if the user is surfing the net with Javascript disabled, is using a browser that does not support CSS, or is viewing a set of flash cards which have no associated style sheet.
- Since details about the fonts, colors, sizes, and other decoration on CIF pages is controlled by external style sheets, none of these details should be hard-coded on CIF pages. This enables institutions to apply custom CSS style sheets to remotely-provisioned CIF modules.
- Growth House, Inc., distributes a default cif.css style sheet to give a common look and feel to all CIF modules which interoperate on Growth House, Inc., information systems.
- Institutions may develop custom CSS style sheets as needed to implement custom CIF solutions for content which resides on their own web sites so long as no changes are made to the actual CIF content cards, which will use the cif.css style sheet at Growth House, Inc.
- By default, the cif.css style sheet should reside in the directory immediately above the directory which contains the CIF module. This permits all CIF module subdirectories to share a single style sheet.
- The style sheet for the module should be referenced by placing the following HTML tag in the HEAD section of each CIF content page: <LINK REL=StyleSheet HREF="../cif.css" TYPE="text/css" MEDIA="screen" TITLE="CIF Default">
Content for this flash card was provided by Growth House, Inc. For full credits click here.