At my job we offer 3rd party services which use a clients website template, but our content. 80-90% of our time is wasted trying to correct CSS issues that occur after we place our code within their template. I found a way to 99.9% of the time not mess with their template code, and only apply CSS to our code, but i'm not sure if it is CSS compliant. Can someone help me out, i'll explain below.

Typically i will save a clkients website to the desktop, then find out where the main content area is within the code, split the file into a header and footer, then we use includes to pull our code in between.

I found that:

if at the end of the header i put something like <div id="Our_Content">

then at the begining of the footer we put </div>

then in OUR stylesheet i add #Our_Content in front of all CSS declarations

it will not touch the clients template, only our content.


The reason i am wondering about this is because sometime i will end up with a weird css line like:

#Our_Content body #someotherID .someclassName td{}

So you're wrapping a <div> around the body?? Because that's what your CSS line: #Our_Content body #someotherID .someclassName td{} seems to indicate. That is definitely not "legal" HTML, if so, and should be avoided. It you're not doing this, it sounds like a reasonable strategy to me.

bad example, we're not wrapping a div around the body. The line would read #Our_Content #someotherID .someclassName td{}

nothing wrong with that.

ok, i didnt think there was just wanted to double check. thanks!