[thelist] IIS 5: Is it Bad to Map .css to asp.dll?
Paul Cowan
paul.cowan at wishlist.com.au
Thu May 17 18:14:38 CDT 2001
Hi James,
> But a partially formed thought occurred to me: what if I
> mapped .css files to the asp.dll in IIS -- can I include
> ASP code in a stand-alone CSS file to conditionally
> create a client-side style sheet?
This is easy enough to do, we've been doing it quite
successfully for a while. One thing we do, though, is not map
.css, but use a 'new' extension (.cssp, at the late hour I did
that it was the best I could think of - I guess it's a mix of
.asp and .cssp, which makes it Cascading Style Server Pages?
Anyway...)
Advantages of this way:
* you can instantly tell from the file extension
whether a given style sheet is standalone or
allows the use of ASP constructs.
* slight speed gain for the vanilla .css files (if you
have any, as they won't need to go through the asp.dll
* if you host other people's pure HTML on your
machine, you can let them use .css without letting
them go through your ASP parser (potentially
executing malicious code)
I know the last one's a hypothetical, but I just thought of it,
and it seems worth mentioning.
The only 'gotcha' is to make sure that your .cssp files (or
whatever) have the line:
<%
response.contenttype = "text/css"
%>
or asp.dll will default to sending text/html, which could have
any number of painful and hard-to-pin-down consequences in a given
browser. I think some Netscapes, for example, don't like stylesheets
that don't have the right MIME type.
There should be no security or other issues (as long as your box
is adequately secured anyway), obviously there will be a slight
performance hit vs. just serving up plain text.
Cheers,
Paul
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