Miscellaneous - Site Style

Microsoft IE9 and HTML5, CSS3

Bridgewebs has grown and evolved over the years. The original framework was designed some time ago and, as with much web development 10 years ago, used images extensively to get the styles that you see. More especially rounded boxes. In the first box below, the curved corners are created using 4 images, one for each corner. Also in the first buttons below these require another 4 images and yet more images to handle the "Hover" colour. In the Bridgewebs - "Settings" - "Site Style" there is an option to set the "Site Colour" and you can pick one of the 12 colours. Each of these images, and others, had to be individually built for each "Site Colour", thus there are several hundred images to handle the various combinations. In fact, there are many pitfalls in trying to make a web site look "Stylish" and what is considered "good" by one person is considered a nightmare by another, as with fashions generally.

A small, but significant, feature has been available for some time (CSS style sheets for the geeks amongst you) with the browsers from Apple and Firefox, more recently Google Chrome, to specify curved boxes. It was expected that Microsoft would include this feature in IE8 but didn't. So, with the majority of use still being IE, most web developers have held off using these features because in Microsoft IE all corners would revert to square, BUT, at long last, it is now available with IE9 and there are a growing number of users with IE9 or other browsers, see below. The time has therefore come to introduce this in Bridgewebs where applicable.
There are 2 significant advantages:

• Efficiency - curved boxes will be built dynamically in the browser. It is not necessary to download the images to produce the corners, some 5 million times a month and the HTML will be more compact.
• Site Style - the restriction on "Site Colour" can be lifted allowing unlimited variations.

In the first instance, starting with later Releases of 2.18 and mainly 2.19, Bridgewebs will, optionally, be extended to use CSS to produce the effect such as in the second box/buttons and later extended to allow you to choose a much wider range of colour, possibly as in the third box/button. You will need to review the "What's New" as the releases become live to see where the features have been updated.