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Dynamic CSS, or DCSS, is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies used together to create dynamic style sheets, by using a combination of any server-sided programming language (such as PHP/ASP/Perl/JSP) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The first idea of DCSS was written in July 2002 by Jori Koolstra, a Dutch programmer.[1]
DCSS allows you to work with variables in CSS and dynamic rewriting of CSS source. Many content management systems have created additional modules, for example Drupal.[2] Sass and Less can be used as dynamic stylesheet languages.
Typically a web page using DCSS is set up in three files. A file that holds the CSS variables, a .php file that echos the CSS content and the web page where the CSS is needed.
A .dcss file normally looks like this.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>DCSS example</title> <style type="text/css"> <?php /* Include the style sheet */ require_once("sheet.dcss.php"); ?> </style> </head> <body> </body> </html>
The included .dcss.php file. Notice that a dcss file always has a .php extension.
<?php /* Include the variables file */ require_once("vars.php"); echo "p"; echo "{"; echo "font-family: \"$FONT_TYPE\";"; echo "}";
And the file that holds the variables for the dcss.php file (often called vars.php).
<?php $FONT_TYPE = "Courier New";