image provider

CSS Fixer


Disclaimer

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have prepared to help you is right here.

This project outline is not like the artificial, tidy little problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer by profession, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavour.

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

This project automates some tedious work managing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) style sheets and CSS style markup. It repairs problems with CSS style sheets and markup and helps maintain them.

The hard work is parsing the style sheet and all the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to discover which styles are defined and which are used. You can then make a list of:

For any given style there are several things the user might want to do with it: Your program makes suggestions what to do with various styles. If the user does not like the suggested replacement for the undefined style, the program lists reasonable alternatives for the user to select by mouse. The user can also type in a name, which is checked to make sure it exists.

The user OKs these suggestions, or modifies them and adds other modifications. When all is as wanted, the user presses Make Changes and all changes are made in a single pass through the files, first checking that no files have changed since the lists were generated.

Sometimes you have multiple style sheets with each of your documents referencing various combinations of the style sheets. You need to account for that too.

TopStyle will find undefined or orphaned styles for you, but it won’t do any corrections.

CSS annotator
parser
TopStyle

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