Comments on: New CSS JavaScript Library

By: Ariel

Ariel — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:07:22 +0000

As said by Charles, jQuery.Rule can manage CSS rules objects, with the difference that the creation,manipulation and filtering is done in a "jQuery-ish" way. Although what Charles said about animation is true, that specific part stills needs a couple of workarounds for IE.

By: devsmt

devsmt — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:25:31 +0000

border-radius, opacity, screen width and resolution are client side issues, how would you fix that on the server?
IMHO, the solution involves css generation on the server(from a framework, with inheritance) and client side fixes in js.
@K9 how behaviour is related to css generation? ins’t intended for events(selecting elements by css selectors…)?

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:57:32 +0000

Manipulating CSS rules instead of individual styles is much faster for large collections of objects. This has been debated and proven on the jQuery mailing lists, and there is now a jQuery plugin, jQuery.Rule to animate through CSS. In that way, this is very useful. Also consider that fixing IE’s opacity and manipulating border-radius is much easier (and almost always done) through JS than server-side.
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I do agree that in general relying on JS to display basic page layout is a bad idea. However, things like column layouts, opacity, min/max height/width and margin: auto in IE, RGBA colors and other (CSS3 standard properties) are properly implemented for all browsers in CSS, there’s always going to be some JS in page styling. Coming from print layout, it’s amazing the basic techniques that can’t be used to style webpages — all due to lack of browser support.
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As long as the page is readable, functional, and accessible on load without JS, do whatever you want to the style afterwards.

By: Tiago Albineli Motta

Tiago Albineli Motta — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:46:28 +0000

It’s exactly what i need, but i can not use this library because mootools is too big.

By: chaoskaizer

chaoskaizer — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:40:02 +0000

Thats a nice oo interface but its not practical to mixup css with javascript.
Should consider using server side implementation instead. Having css-expression inside stylesheet is already a sin.

By: K9

K9 — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:52:41 +0000

Interesting, some of the examples don’t immediately make sense to me, however the idea of changing one style rule instead of looping through the DOM is definitely interesting.

I know that jQuery UI is doing something similar with transition effects in order to improve performance. For example:
http://dev.jquery.com/view/trunk/ui/apps/gallery_advanced/

Look at line 82 of the javascript for that page to see that the image size slider is actually changing the underlying CSS rule instead of modifying elements’ style attributes:
http://dev.jquery.com/view/trunk/ui/apps/gallery_advanced/behaviour.js

By: Jon Hartmann

Jon Hartmann — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:04:27 +0000

I’m in the “better done serverside” camp… at a minimum you wont loose CSS and JS both if a user has JS disabled/

By: Robin

Robin — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:58:05 +0000

Tobie – I’d guess 100% of it is done better serverside.

By: VOIPWONDERS.COM

VOIPWONDERS.COM — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:58:00 +0000

I can comment on it better after trying this.

By: Grab

Grab — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:18:47 +0000

That’s the point.
Non js in the CSS please?

By: Tobie Langel

Tobie Langel — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:35:30 +0000

Isn’t 95% of this better done server-side ?

By: Jean-Philippe Encausse

Jean-Philippe Encausse — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:25:41 +0000

Well, in fact it seems to be the same concept than a 18Month old library called Behavior … nothing more …