Rule #57 of Liferay Theme Design (for non-theme guys like me) - Liferay

Rule #57 of Liferay Theme Design (for non-theme guys like me)

Have you ever had a super freakish problem with the Liferay CSS Not doing what you expected? I mean I love Liferay's new Minifier, it's fast and efficient. But, it's no fun when you have problems.

Suppose you have some css:

.something-a .something-b, .something-c .something-d, .ie6 .something-e { ... do this ... } .something-g { ... do that ... }

Looks innocent enough, right?

NOPE!

It's not innocent! Inside there lies a develish beast that is waiting to bite your earlobes off. But really he's supposed to be your friend... he just needs to be handled with certain amount of firmness, tough love so to speak. You have to set and keep some rules. Otherwise, he'll misbehave.

He'll reduce the above css on a non-ie6 browser to this:

.something-a .something-b, .something-c .something-d, .something-g { ... do that ... }

which is NOT what you wanted at all, am I right?

Rule #57 of Liferay Theme Design is: Never, ever, ever mix browser css selectors with non-browser selector css definitions! Always break them out like this:

.something-a .something-b, .something-c .something-d{ ... do this ... }

.ie6 .something-e { ... do this ... } .something-g { ... do that ... }

There, now you have laid down the law! Mr. Minifier will handle your css appropriately.

5 Comments

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This sounds more like a bug report than a rule. I would tell folks to forget the rule and tell Mr. Minifier to fix the bug.

You should be able to do anything you can do with regular CSS, period.

Good CSS form is one thing; it's something I regularly encourage to the outside and demand internally, but ultimately (bugs aside) we shouldn't force people to write themes any other way than they know they already can, especially elsewhere --- where would Wordpress be if they forced their themes to be well written? 3000 themes look better than 30 to John Regular User. :-D

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I fully agree with you Jon! It makes perfect sense to me.

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Agree

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It's not so much a bug as an unexpected side effect of certain performance tuning, and yes, we do, can and should enforce certain conventions.

Since browser selectors are fairly unique to Liferay (apart from most other CMS/portals/etc), it's also not unreasonable to have certain guidelines when dealing with them.

And this convention is much easier to enforce (and much better for long term maintenance) than to try to imagine and parse every possible way in which a user could potentially write their CSS. Not to say it won't be fixed, but as a general rule, your browser specific hacks should not be too entangled into non-hacky code.

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