Archie Maskill

Archie (<mailto:disposable23@yahoo.co.uk> has been fraternizing with elements of OUSFG since late 1997 (originally Alx Williams, his tutorial partner and then OUSFG President). OUSFG let itself into his room while he was out making a cup of tea in early 1998, and that was that. Hey, at least it brought muffins.

Archie is an ex-OUSFG Librarian and a dabbler of Ousfg Dot Net <http://www.ousfg.net>.

He is a director of Stellar Pioneers <http://www.stellarpioneers.com>, aiming to roll-out a weird hybrid of Settlers Of Catan, Command & Conquer, Civilisation and EBay, playable from within CSS?-capable browsers. This project has been in hibernation for some time, but has recently relaunched. He likes : Python Language, C Language?, C Sharp Language? and operating systems that are POSIX Compliant?.

Currently, he's working on some distributed video-playing thing.

• Archie - i have zis plan, you see. I want to hand over most of the control over how the wiki looks to a CSS? stylesheet. I would let people cookie themselves with a URL for a stylesheet, then get the HTML header generation code to parrot it back to them. Thus, arguments over how various things should look could be resolved by giving people a personalised stylesheet. Is that plausible? How powerful is CSS?? I'd like to do things like putting a colon after a <dt> element, making various things bold or not, making the toolbar look different, or be in a different place, etc. -- TA

• So... Butch wants to be Sundance, eh? It sounds plausible, yes. I recall http://totl.net doing this for a while, but it looks like they removed this feature. CSS? is fairly powerful - any standard HTML tags can have styles attached to them. You can effectively create new style tags using CSS? classes and the <div class=""> and <span class=""> tags. The main purpose of CSS? is to separate style and content. The colon you mention above would count as content, so CSS? wouldn't be able to automatically place a colon in a <dt> tag (though it could easily apply a style to <dt> content). CSS? is excellent at positioning elements (relatively and absolutely), so the toolbar positioning sounds plausible.

• So you can't just throw in entirely new chunks of text? Say, if i wanted "All your base are belong to me!" to appear at the bottom of each page, i couldn't do that? I suppose XSL? has to be good for something.

• Incidentally, you can use CSS2? to add new content to a page, using the before and after pseudo-attributes and the content attribute, or something (i saw it on the web somewhere - i know nothing about CSS?, so don't ask me). However, no browsers actually implement this - not even Mozilla. -- TA

• Actually mozilla does implement them, but not in an overly useful way. You can insert plain text, with no tags. IE? doesn't though. -- DS

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