|
<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: Designing Templates > Using Styles |
"Internal or external that is the question"
(Not a quote from Shakespeare)
In your templates you will almost certainly find yourself using CSS "styles" to format the display of your documents. The main question is whether you will embed the styles directly into your HTML as "inline" styles or in <style></style> tags like so:
<style type="text/css">
.mainbody {margin: 0; font:10pt Verdana;color:black; padding-top: 1px; padding-left: 2px;}
table {width: 100%;background-color: #f1f1c1;border-top-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid; border-width: thin;}
td#c01 {background-color: white;width:64px ;border: 1px solid black;border-collapse: collapse;}
</style>
Or whether you will link to an external stylesheet like so:
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyles.css" />
</head>
Certainly you can use external stylesheets in your UltraPort HL7 Document Templates, you have almost the entire width and breadth of all HTML functionality at your disposal. Also, of course, it depends on your own business model and exactly how you are using your published documents.
At HermeTech our recommendation is that you do not use external style sheets, or really ANY external resources if at all possible. This includes external images links as well, we recommend that you use our internal image tools (see Using the Image Library).
WHY does HermeTech recommend this? It's all part of our intended goal of making making the HL7 Document Template completely self-contained. You can review the help section Keeping it all Internal for a more complete explanation, but the short answer is portability. If you can manage to design your templates so that they do not rely on any external resources then they will be 100% portable and can be deployed to any computer at any time without worry.
See Also: Help Designing Templates