I'm updating our web site and, naturally, I want to use current standards for my HTML, and some of the newer features such as style sheets to make the web site cleaner and easier to navigate. But I was faced with a conflict - I want to be able to support customers who are browsing to our site with older browsers, AND I want to be able to make full use of style sheets and other newer facilities for those users with recent client software.

A first approach of attempting to come up with a set of style sheets to work with all our target browsers turned ino something of a complex exercise. It's pretty disheartening to spend a lot of time applying a fix to "kludge" one browser just to find that you've upset another. and the resulting file gets twice as hard to maintain each time a new set of browser support is added. Quite simply, it's not practical to come up with a single set of HTML and CSS that will well on all the older browsers AND will support the facilities of the newer ones that we wish to use

Our solution is to add PHP code into the style sheet ... and to tell the web server that .css files are to be parsed through the PHP module. It works a treat, and we set a header line to ensure the browser is told it's actually getting .css data. We can even pass parameters into the style sheet - in this example, to tell it to use a larger base font size to suit the accessability requirements of the disability discrimination act if need be.

<?php
header("content-type: text/css");
$mencolour = "#ffffcc";
$texcolour = "#000000";
$bfsize = 10;
if ($_REQUEST[fsize] == 1) $bfsize = 16;
?>

body {
font: normal <?= $bfsize ?>px verdana;
color: <?= $texcolour ?>;
}
(written 2005-09-12, updated 2006-06-05)

 H112 - PHP - Further Web Page and Network Handling
  [220] When to use Frames - (2005-02-19)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)
  [356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
  [372] Time calculation in PHP - (2005-07-08)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
  [425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
  [451] Accessing a page via POST from within a PHP script - (2005-09-26)
  [484] Setting the file name for a downloaded document - (2005-11-03)
  [537] Daily Image Santafied - (2005-12-22)
  [542] Morning image, afternoon image - (2005-12-26)
  [565] Using PHP to output images, XML, Style sheets, etc - (2006-01-15)
  [603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
  [675] Adding PHP tags to an old cgi program - (2006-04-08)
  [767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
  [789] Hot answers in PHP - (2006-07-02)
  [847] Image maps for navigation - a straightforward example - (2006-08-28)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
  [936] Global, Superglobal, Session variables - scope and persistance in PHP - (2006-11-21)
  [1009] Passing GET parameters through Apache mod_rewrite - (2006-12-27)
  [1114] PHP Image upload script - (2007-03-21)
  [1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
  [1187] Updating a page strictly every minute (PHP, Perl) - (2007-05-14)
  [1210] PHP header() function - uses and new restrictions - (2007-05-30)
  [1355] .php or .html extension? Morally Static Pages - (2007-09-17)
  [1379] Simple page password protection - PHP - (2007-10-04)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1495] Single login and single threaded models - Java and PHP - (2008-01-04)
  [1496] PHP / Web 2 logging - (2008-01-06)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1515] Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status - (2008-01-22)
  [1518] Downloading data for use in Excel (from PHP / MySQL) - (2008-01-25)
  [1549] http, https and ajp - comparison and choice - (2008-02-22)
  [2632] Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP - (2010-02-12)
  [2679] How to build a test harness into your PHP - (2010-03-16)
  [2729] Uploading a document or image to its own URL via a browser - (2010-04-18)
  [2918] Downloading a report from the web for further local analysis - (2010-08-13)
  [3036] Sending out an email containing HTML from within a PHP page - (2010-11-07)
  [3432] 3 digit HTTP status codes - what are they, which are most common, which should be a concern? - (2011-09-11)
  [3540] Easy session example in PHP - keeping each customers data apart - (2011-12-06)
  [3568] Telling which ServerAlias your visitor used - useful during merging domains - (2012-01-04)
  [3918] Multiple page web applications - maintaining state - PHP - (2012-11-10)
  [4070] Passing variable between PHP pages - hidden fields, cookies and sessions - (2013-04-26)
  [4483] Moving from mysql to mysqli - simple worked example - (2015-05-03)

A211 - Web Application Design and Deployment
  [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
  [659] Web Application Components - (2006-03-28)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1256] What country are you in? How we find out on our web site - (2007-07-03)
  [1351] Compressing web pages sent out from server. Is it worth it? - (2007-09-14)
  [1545] Letting new visitors know we provide training courses - (2008-02-19)
  [1547] New bathing idea for hotels from Hotelympia - (2008-02-20)
  [1798] What does an browser understand? What does an HTML document contain? - (2008-09-15)
  [2072] Copyright, Portability and other nontechnical web site issues - (2009-03-09)
  [3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)

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Tomorrow's meeting.
Up early
Sticky news
Database or Progamming - which to learn first?
Server side scripting of styles to suit the browser
How far away is that server?
Upgrade!
You cant
Fair system for travel and accommodation expenses
Outside of the box