UDASSS stands for Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher. As some might know, this package made it's debut on
24ways, however for further documentation, I will be keeping that here. So for now, since the download package links to this page, I am putting up this page as a place holder until I get more time to document the in's and out's of its use.
Technical Information
The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher combines the power of Server Side processing and DOM scripting to swap style sheets on the fly with the power of Ajax. If JavaScript is disabled - UDASSS degrades gracefully to improve your website accessibility. Needless to say, it is very sexy indeed.
Good news about UDASSS
UDASSS is special for quite a few reasons. It doesn't fully rely on JavaScript to swap alternate style sheets. If you're looking for a pure JavaScript solution, look no further than Paul Sowden's excellent article found at Alistapart called
Alternate Style. It has been trusted for many years and to this day is the best JavaScript style sheet switcher. The only down-side to using Paul's method is that when a user saves an 'alternate style' as their preferred, they will experience
FOOS (Flash of Old Styles) since the user has to wait for the window 'load' event to occur before the cookie is read which ultimately is used to get the preferred style sheet.
However with UDASSS one does not need to worry about the perils of visitors having JavaScript being disabled. As of this date it is known that anywhere from 9% - 11% of web users are browsing without JavaScript. So with this information, some web developers have turned to alternative methods such as using server-side technologies like PHP to save their users preferences of styles. This is a great method, but we have nonetheless lost our 'sleekness' of client-side 'hoorah'.
All things being said, UDASSS takes advantage of combined client-side style switching and
xmlHttpRequest to set cookies via PHP to save the user's style preference. Furthermore, a user with JavaScript disabled can still benefit from UDASSS because it degrades to have the functionality of normal PHP style switcher. Hence, you get the best of both methods!
Other Resources for U.D.A.S.S.S.
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