CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlcss
cereallarceny
cereallarceny

Reputation: 4983

Is it less efficient to write dynamic CSS stylesheets with a PHP file extension?

Ive been trying to think of ways to dynamically change a style based off of input from a website back-end (through a language like PHP). Normally I have my stylesheets be separate CSS-extension files, but these won't allow for PHP tags natively. It is, after all, extra markup in your HTML file than having all of your styles be in a separate file. Is the usage of the HTML <style> tag perhaps slower/less efficient than using a stylesheet?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 816

Answers (2)

eggyal
eggyal

Reputation: 125865

The W3C Recommendation for CSS 2.1 contains a section on Conformance: Requirements and Recommendations, which makes no reference to filename extension but does state:

3.4 The text/css content type

CSS style sheets that exist in separate files are sent over the Internet as a sequence of bytes accompanied by encoding information. The structure of the transmission, termed a message entity, is defined by RFC 2045 and RFC 2616 (see [RFC2045] and [RFC2616]). A message entity with a content type of "text/css" represents an independent CSS document. The "text/css" content type has been registered by RFC 2318 ([RFC2318]).

Therefore, provided that the file is served with the text/css content type (and that any cacheing concerns are addressed as mentioned in @Fluffeh's answer), you should not have a problem. In PHP, the content type can be set with a call to header() before any output is sent:

<? header('Content-type: text/css'); ?>

Upvotes: 9

Fluffeh
Fluffeh

Reputation: 33512

I am not so sure that you want to do too much inside the CSS. If anything, I would suggest maybe adding some extra classes rather than doing too much dynamically. If anything, you might be better off with using PHP to pick a CSS sheet to include, but leave them as CSS. If you keep using the same file, the user can cache it, it appears much quicker. It would be better to have a stylesheet of 50k that is used ocne then cached rather than a stylesheet of 10k that is downloaded with each and every single page.

Upvotes: 4

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