Cascading and the buses
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-12-18 18:05:36 - Graham Ellis1. Public transport services are operated around these parts by the First Group.
2. The 272 bus is operated by Faresaver.
3. Town buses in Melksham are run by Frome Minibuses.
4. If you see a white bus around, it will be the Seend Shuttle
We cascade information in real life. My initial statement sets as broad brush approach, telling you that you'll find, unless otherwise stated, that First will be your public transport operator. But then you'll find that the broad brush statement is overwritten in some specific cases by alternative information - and that extra information may be provided by route, by zone, or because it's a specific bus. And that's very much how cascading style sheets work.
You set a general attribute - let's say the color of the text and foreground - to be purple (hey, that's one of First's colours). You then override the text for all paragraphs - green for example. That's going to represent Frome Minibuses. Paragraphs with a certain label (i.e. belonging to a class) are overwritten with a dirty cream colour - just as buses labelled 272 are run by FareSaver. And finally there's a specific white bus which is the Seend Shuttle.
Style:
* {color: purple;}
p {color: green;}
.r272 {color: olive;}
#seend {color: white;}Now that was just colour. We can go on and lay attributes such as size of bus, whether it's subsidised by the county council, whether it has low floors, and whether the service runs on a Sunday over the top, each with different cascading requirements and you can see just how complex both public transport in Wiltshire and Cascading Style Sheets can become.
And you'll also learn "KISS" - keep it simple, stupid. For your own sanity, and for the sanity of the users of the service, there should be a clear logic to what's implemented and provided so that the results are understandable and acceptable to all.