m4 Macros and CSS
December 18th, 2010
5 comments
I’m certainly not the first person to consider this, but it’s a simple enough technique for managing CSS that it bears repeating.
The problem: your CSS has a bunch of constants hard-coded in it all over the place, because CSS doesn’t support the concept of variables.
Perhaps the original theme color was #1122ff, and so you have CSS like this, where the string “1122ff” appears about 8 million times in your various CSS files:
#somediv {
background-color: #1122ff;
}
.othertext {
color: #1122ff;
}
But then you find out that the new theme color is going to be #2211ff and can you please change it. Sure there’s search-and-replace, but there might be false positives, and it’s not easy to verify that everything replaced well.
But there is a better way!
