Other than carving it up & assigning class names, not difficult at all (referring to allowing style sheets to be applied to the "latest posts" page). But before we go and do that, I'd like to debut the new thread format (and while doing so, breaking all existing style sheets. Uhg.)Fire when ready.
Speaking of which, what are the restrictions on class selectors? Not what is in the spec, but what is actually out there. Will fr_article_body and fr_comment_body be too long? Will the underscores confuse some dumb ol' browser? BTW, I think the "fr_" prefix will solve almost all possible name conflicts with source material.I don't think that understcores alone breaks NS 4.77 (definitely won't break IE 5.5/6 or NS 6). All you can do is try it (don't recall any site that's "broken" in NS 4.77 being broken because of either class length or underscores in class).
Anyway, I think I'm on to something here. I'm using multiple div tags to classify chunks of the thread.
The first div names a class "article" or "comment". This envelops the entity from head (header) to toe (menu choices).
Each of those can have a state, which is the second div which envelops from head to toe. The class names of the states are "normal" for regular posts, "removed" for deleted material (normal users just see the text "deleted comment", but moderators and up will see the entire 'removed' comment) and "private" (which is a special feature of the new forum, more on that in due time.)
Contained within this pair of div tags come the "header", "body", and "menu". "header" is assigned to a table, "body" and "menu" are divs.
<div class="article|comment">
<div class="normal|removed|private">
<table class="header"></table>
<div class="body"></div>
<div class="menu"></div>
</div>
</div>
There's also a "page" class used on divs, and "page_here" and "page_goto" which are used on a hrefs within the page div. The new forum will paginate threads, 20 replies per page, and will have a nifty navigation bar to zoom through the replies. (Threads will now be able to accommodate over 65,000 replies without breaking a sweat. Revenge of the PLEASE IGNORE THIS THREAD.)
While using the page bar, the article text will be collapsed, and that is currently served by a "collapsed" class on a div. There's also a "title" class if you should want to give special treatment to titles.
I'll get this stuff up ASAP, I'd like to see what you guys can do with it. I spent the night goofing around with CSS, testing out the layout. My appeciation of dark art really shines through on these things. What can I say, I like rainy days.
Here's one question, I think I know the answer but haven't put it to the test yet. Would it be better to access the style sheet via a common URL, like /perl/css and have that URL return the content of the custom style sheet. Or would it be more preferrable to specify the URL of the style sheet? The later option would allow you to store your style sheet on your hard drive for easy customization.