I would like to use conditions in my CSS.
The idea is that I have a variable that I replace when the site is run to generate the right style-sheet.
I want it so that according to this variable the style-sheet changes!
It looks like:
[if {var} eq 2 ]
background-position : 150px 8px;
[else]
background-position : 4px 8px;
Can this be done? How do you do this?
Not in the traditional sense, but you can use classes for this, if you have access to the HTML. Consider this:
<p class="normal">Text</p>
<p class="active">Text</p>
and in your CSS file:
p.normal {
background-position : 150px 8px;
}
p.active {
background-position : 4px 8px;
}
That's the CSS way to do it.
Then there are CSS preprocessors like Sass. You can use conditionals there, which'd look like this:
$type: monster;
p {
@if $type == ocean {
color: blue;
} @else if $type == matador {
color: red;
} @else if $type == monster {
color: green;
} @else {
color: black;
}
}
Disadvantages are, that you're bound to pre-process your stylesheets, and that the condition is evaluated at compile time, not run time.
A newer feature of CSS proper are custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables). They are evaluated at run time (in browsers supporting them).
With them you could do something along the line:
:root {
--main-bg-color: brown;
}
.one {
background-color: var(--main-bg-color);
}
.two {
background-color: black;
}
Finally, you can preprocess your stylesheet with your favourite server-side language. If you're using PHP, serve a style.css.php
file, that looks something like this:
p {
background-position: <?php echo (@$_GET['foo'] == 'bar')? "150" : "4"; ?>px 8px;
}
In this case, you will however have a performance impact, since caching such a stylesheet will be difficult.