I got around to learning how style sheets can be destroyed and attached on the fly, so now the site builds and caches style sheets as it needs them (including color graduations, using ImageMagick if necessary). It was a lot of work to do something conceptually very simple: maintain one CSS template that can be re-used for any color combination, colors being the only thing that changes from theme to theme. Hmm. wasn't CSS supposed to be powerful? Isn't this a simple wish?

I was then able to improve the color theme chooser page to allow dynamic preview: just click on a theme name, and the old style sheet for the page is disabled and the new one loaded, allowing you to see instantly what it looks like. (link).



Of course these don't really deserve the name "theme" when all they do is change colors. There isn't enough html classed and id'd to allow massive changes in style via CSS, and we still use tables to layout things. That isn't likely to change, dslreports.com isn't a blog on typesetting or cutting-edge CSS after all.