I am constantly suprised that no matter how much I learn about Notes Development there seems to be so much more I still don't know. In the past few days both Nathan Freeman and Chris Blatnik posted some excellent articles on how to use style sheets to simulate the HTML Fieldset capability on a Notes client. I had always thought Style Sheet resources were the domain of Web application development only. It never occured to me that these could be used to style a Notes client application...
So I have already been busy enhancing the UI for a number of forms in the .Domino Framework that utilize the tricks they have shown. In doing so it also occured to me that it may in fact possible to build a Notes application in such a way that the look/feel can be customized to suit individual preferences.
The .Domino Framework supports a User Preferences form/profile document in which each user can (now) select from a list of available skins. Each supported skin is represented by a Style Sheet, and an associated subform that contains this style sheet. Various forms in the .Domino Framework can now include a computed subform that is based upon the user's preferred skin. And voila the look/feel of the form reflects the user's preferred skin.
As best as I can tell a great many Notes Design elements still do not get effected by Style Sheets so this is a at best a partial solution. The application skinning feature is still needed to apply a base theme to an application (views, embedded outlines etc.) At least now I can provide some flexibility how some aspects of the application look/feel.
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1 Nathan T Freeman Permalink Search the Designer help for "Creating style sheets as shared resources."
The available controls are documented.
The only one that's particularly frustrating is the lack of
text-align. You have to align content in the Design.
The only other key consideration is that you can't apply the CSS to
a view. (Actually, *I* can because Lotus 911 has a super-special
magic tool for it, but you can't have that, sorry. :-) )
2 Peter Presnell Permalink Thanks for the tip Nathan. The list of controls was on my wish list... (As now is that super-special magic tool)