I gotta say this is one place where the cgi "handler" trick is useful. If you are HTML::Mason'ing or other meta-content generator, this is even easier. just link the users stylesheet to a url like this: 
<LINK rel=STYLESHEET TYPE="text/css" href="/style/USERNAME.css">
# style is a CGI/handler in the main path

[download]

Now when you generate the CSS code for them it "looks" like it's coming from a file and you can further spoof browsers into caching the data by sending the header: 

Last-Modified: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 19:24:17 GMT

[download]

If you store a last changed date with the users prefs, you can make a cheesy HEAD/Conditional-GET that just grabs the change date and returns the 304 Unchanged response if the dates match. With just a little more work, the browsers cache the stylesheet and you beat up on your DB just a little less. That is a bandwidth and sanity win all the way around.

There are a lot more tweaks you can throw at it. I've got a conditional handler laying about somewhere for Mason, I think. I started to do this very same thing but haven't yet bothered with customizability since I'm working real functionality on the site I'm doing.

--
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honk() if $you->love(perl)

In reply to RE: Parsing and Spewing CSS by extremely
in thread Parsing and Spewing CSS by davemabe

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