[Typo3-dev] Credo for CSS in tt_news template formatting (applies to other extensions)

[Jörg Schaller]

Hi all,

the reason I write this is that I have been playing around with
customizing the news template and have found some limits.

Situtation now: 

In a limited way, the template can be customized via html
news_template.tmpl. I reached the limit when I wanted to format the
news title header with CSS. Instead of using the CSS style, the header
box is defined by typoscript as far as I can see, and my CSS styles
are ignored/overriden for this portion of html.


Outlook:

Typo3 advocates a division of programming, design and content. Kasper
himself talks about this trinity in the introductory typo3 document.
Programming (Typoscript) and design are not always clearly
distinguishable, though, and that's why we probably have this
dichotomy of typoscript and html in the news template.

However, with CSS3 around the corner, we will have formatting
possibilities like never before. One of the most appealing aspects
will be rounded boxes with just one CSS styling command (if you have a
newer version of Mozilla you can see a working example on the
frontpage of www.jorgo.org where I am using this for the blog
headers.)


Desirable Situation:

It would be fantastic from a webdesigner's point of view to do all
formatting for frontend extensions in an htm template with a CSS style
sheet attached to it instead of using typoscript. An even more
accomplished example can be seen in the ee_blog extension, where all
the CSS styles are incorporated in ext_typoscript_setup.txt which in
theory makes it possible to change/select CSS formatting in the
Constant editor by point and click (it would have to be in
ext_typoscript_constants.txt then, I assume).


Jörg