Craig Rowe
Techlead / Developer
12th April 2009
The Old Switcharoo
Having had only non-designer girls appreciate my design for cargowire I managed to cajole co-Headscapist Ed Merritt into creating an alternative.
Ed provided me with a flat image source to work from (so I can be blamed for the ragged CSS implementation which will no doubt be fixed up over time) and I decided, instead of throwing away my design, to implement a style chooser (based on the classic 'alternate stylesheet' ALA article).
This is all relatively simple stuff. The main issue I had was that I was running sIFR which would already have run before a user switches styles. This essentially throws away my ability to switch styles without a page refresh (whereby my JS can check for the style in use before running sIFR).
Additionally Eds design contained some slightly different content to my own, and this meant some markup changes, which I was kind of against. However I would rather add markup and modify my css for the original design to hide it, than add in content using jQuery for an alternate design. If anything semantically speaking the changes added to the content anyway but it did highlight how coupled designs and content can be regardless of an abstracted presentation layer.
A Javascript switcher is available at the base of the page if you wish to check out the results.
I'm off to investigate a nice way to turn sIFR off dynamically...
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