Altering CSS to style ColdFusion 8 UI - Good Idea?
Posted At : October 19, 2007 6:48 AM
| Posted By : Dave
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ColdFusion
The new UI features of ColdFusion 8 are pretty amazing. They have made it possible for anyone to easily take their web applications to the next level. These new features allow you to do away with old style design. For example CFWINDOW instead of a pop-up window or using CFLAYOUT tabs to load different data onto the same screen without page refreshing.
The downside of all this is changing how the UI elements look. You can apply CSS styles to elements to change their look but not everything is exposed. There are a ton more styling that could be done once you look under the hood. Using Firefox with the FireBug plugin you can see all the different styles and classes used in the UI elements. With this information you can start to get creative styling the UI.
The question comes in as to whether it is a good idea. While you can get in and alter just about everything in the UI; all this extra, under the hood, stuff is undocumented. There are many inherent dangers in playing with undocumented items. Things are usually undocumented for a reason. There is no guarantee that they will remain the same from version to version. It is possible that the class used for an item may not be the same class in the next version.
I have posted a bunch of different ways to alter the CSS for ColdFusion 8 UI items. I personally don't think it is a bad idea. But I do think that the developer needs to be careful of what they modify. I have gone as far as to keep a list of modified CSS styles and classes. I also try and centralize the changes in a single CSS doc. This way when a new version comes out making sure my alterations still work will be easier.
Hopefully in the future more styling options will be exposed. But until then, if you choose to alter styles in this fashion just be careful and diligent in your coding. Doing so will save you many headaches during upgrade time.
--Dave
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/988-ColdFusion-CSS-An...
I personally don't see an issue with overriding the styles at all. CSS allows you to do so.
However, I wish Adobe would work with their underlying JS frameworks to come up with a better way to skin these elements. Without some level of skinning, it reduces the places I'll be able to use these great CF features.