CSS: Common vs Individual Stylesheets

[tajmone]

@thoni56,

Soon more HTML documents will use Highlight, which also means that they will need the dedicated custom CSS to embedded in their docinfo.html files.

Some documents use some dedicated styles which may or maybe not used by other docs (usually, these are additional block styles or alternative Highlight themes to distinguish a tutorial's ALAN code from library code or generic example, etx.).

Currently I was thinking of using the same Sass source to generated a common stylesheet and docinfo.html file for documents in this project.

I'm not sure what the best strategy is in this respect, should we:

1. Create an ad hoc stylesheet for each document, depending on its needs.
2. Use a common stylesheet, regardless of whether some documents are not using all styles.

Solution 1 leads to lighter documents, in case there are many unused styles that can be left out, but requires more maintenance work when there are updates to the Sass source — although the Sass sources are modular, we'd need to keep track of which document uses which modules.

Solution 2 leads to bigger documents, due to the presence of styles definitions which might not be used by some documents, but has the advantage of having a unified stylesheet for all documents, at the cost of some extra bloat.

I'm tempted to adopt solution 2, which isn't after all different from they way the Fopub templates work for the PDF format (in this case, because it would be just to complicate to handle different templates).

[thoni56]

I'm assuming the weight of the final HTML is not a big deal, and might not even be highly impacted if we have embedded images etc.?

If so, the choice seems easy, I agree, go with the more general solution 2.