UI Options and !important

[Clark, Colin]

A quick update on this work...

On 2011-07-04, at 5:17 PM, Colin Clark wrote:
> 
> Here are our next steps:
> 
> 1. Determine the list of declarations that require !important to be added to them. 

I've gone through each of the FSS stylesheets on an !important hunt. Here's what I found:

fss-text.css adds !important to the following properties:
	font-size
	line-height
	font-family
	color
	background-color
	background-image

the theme files add !important to these properties:
	td border
	background-color
	background
	color
	
However, not every reference to these properties was made !important. Are we safe to add !important to any occurrence of these properties, or do we need to scope them only to certain selectors? If so, it'll involve a bit more work in our code, but not a lot.

Heidi and Justin, we need you to look into this ASAP and make a recommendation.

> 2. Implement the code to read, parse, prioritize and serialize the stylesheet inside a browser (so we have access to good developer tools like Firebug).  We'll parameterize the strategy we use to read and write CSS so that it will be easy to port this code to our Ant-driven JavaScript build system. 
> 4. Write unit tests for the code that can be run in the browser.

I've pushed a rough working sketch into Michelle's fork. Unfortunately any code that runs as part of our build system (using Rhino) can't use jQuery or the framework (due to the lack of a DOM), so this is pretty old-fashioned looking code, but it's working and should provide a decent base for refinement.

https://github.com/michelled/infusion/commit/465bf9a163ab60d4aefc2ae38f8d6877c7a49e7c

Colin

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Colin Clark
Lead Software Architect,
Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
http://inclusivedesign.ca