[thelist] web client "decorator"?

Kristian Rink kristian at zimmer428.net
Tue Dec 20 06:52:21 CST 2005


Hi all;

we're running a document management system our customers are able to
access using a web-client platform. The web client is _really_ _really_
ugly 1990s markup (nested-tables - layout, no "id"'s or "class"'es ).
The system itself is highly proprietary and (talking about the web
client part) closed-source and also not relying upon some templating
library so I'm not able to change what markup is generated by the
system. There's only a configuration option for the web client to
include a line of "inline css" which will be placed within the
web-client markup delivered to the client browser.

That's what I got. What I want to do is simple: I'm told to visually
refresh the web client as far as possible using the tools that are
available. So, a few (stupid?) questions:

- Inline CSS is spread all over the web client markup. Is there a way,
in @import'ed CSS file, to force that the inline style should override
the style specified in the @import'ed file? In example, there are some
table cells inline-formatted using <td style="inset white;">..., that's
something I don't want to do for all table cells, and, right there, the
layout is not nested enough to specify a stylesheet for something, like,
"table td table td".

- The lack of id's or classes feels really bad. Is there any meaningful
way of abusing CSS to apply style definitions to, say, for example a
certain image depending on its src attribute, or an anchor depending on
its href? Or is this just a bad idea?

- Overally: Is there _any_ meaningful way of formatting broken markup
using CSS, or should I better stay off all this?


TIA and bye,
Kris


-- 
Kristian Rink *  http://zimmer428.net * jab: kawazu at jabber.ccc.de
icq: 48874445 *  fon: ++49 176 2447 2771

"Be yourself the kind of change you want to see in this world." (Gandhi)



More information about the thelist mailing list