Topic: Apply Style Without Editing Page

This may have more to do with server-side scripting, but we'll start here in case there's a simpler answer.

Here's what I want to do. For the book I'm working on, I've got a spreadsheet of information I need to publish to the Web for those I'm collaborating with. It's basically a fancy to-do list. It's all kept in Excel 2000 and I'm exporting it as a Web page from there. Of course it's filled with MS garbage, but nothing causes a problem except for the widths it adds to the tables and table cells.

All I want to do is apply the styles:

table { width: auto !important; }
td { width: auto !important; }

without having to edit the page every time I save it. There's way too much else to do and too much else to remember without having to edit the stylesheet every time I update the to-do list.

Is there a way to force a page to use a stylesheet (from the perspective of the publisher) without touching the page? Some .htaccess hocus pocus maybe?

I would simply load the page via a template page that calls the CSS, and includes the excel output file.

That's the simplest route I can see, unless it's possible to edit the default page that excel outputs?

Problem with including it into another document is that the document that Excel exports has its own headers and stuff.

And I haven't been able to find any templates or anything for the output.

Just tried to include the style in the spreadsheet itself, but I can't keep it from converting it to special characters.

Oh, where's the magic?

You could use htaccess to redirect web page URLs to a CGI script URL with the page given as an argument, and have the script find a reasonable place to insert the style sheet if it's the right page.


 

If your server is Apache I believe there's a httpd.conf directive that can also be used in a .htaccess file to replace the headers of all pages called within that directory with the given HTML header. Just let me look it up, and we'll see.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

the htaccess would only replace the http headers - which have nothing to say about the stylesheet.

slime is on the write way - have a script that replaces the css in the document and then outputs the document (with the appropriate headers, of course).

No, according to Apache.org:

quote:

---

HeaderName <filename>
Name of the file that will be inserted at the top of the index listing

---

So if one were to make sure the file was called index.html...


Justice 4 Pat Richard

You know, I wasn't sure that would work at first, but rereading it, it might do the trick.

I'm further away from finishing the preliminary list than I thought, so when I'm done I'll see if I can make it work.