General Questions about Large / Complex Stylesheets

[pmario]

@Justin_H

Should you keep all of your styles in a single sheet and structure it based on how your tiddlywiki is rendered, similar to what is done in the vanilla theme, or should you divide it up into multiple tiddlers?

I think it depends on your personal preference. I personally like to have styles in 1 place. Except for styles, that I want to dynamically switch on or off. The easiest way to do this is remove the $:/tags/Stylesheet tiddler. I rename it to $:/tags/StylesheetXX so I can still find it easily. – But that’s my personal preference

@Justin_H

Why was the vanilla theme structured as it was? was it the final product of multiple individuals collaborating, or was it just a stylesheet that had been revised several times to a final state?

It mainly did organically grow to the size it has now. If you look at TW v5.1.0 in the archive you will see that it has about 1400 lines including all the whitespace. ~1200 loc (lines of code according to github)

TW v5.3.3 has about 3300 lines including whitespace. ~2700 loc (lines of code)

So over the years it has grown quite a bit and due to the “backwards compatibility” requirement it gets more and more complex to change something, without side effects.

@Justin_H

What are some things that should be avoided? ie don’t modify core tiddlers, don’t store styles in <style> tags of your tiddlers, avoid using !important, etc.

Yes. that’s pretty much it. Especially if you want to create stylesheets that others can still adjust themself.

@Justin_H

How does the list field work for tiddlers? does it automatically add tiddlers that are tagged with them? I know the list-before and list-after are overriden by them, and list links draggable uses the list field, I think

The list-field is automatically used to “sort” lists created with [tag[abc]] filters. If you add a new tiddler and tag it “abc”, it will not be added to the list field. You have to d&d sort it. Then new tiddlers will be added.

hope that helps
-mario