Reusing Existing Style Sheets

To make it easier to integrate the generated web pages into an existing web site, you can reuse your existing style sheet rules. The selector of a style sheet rule; the part before the left curly brace, specifies what elements are affected by the declaration. If these elements occur in the generated web pages, these elements will get the required look-and-feel.

Each Web Designer control has an internal ID and belongs to a Class. The default values are the internal Web Designer Class and ID, for example:

•Class: ContainerControl

•Id: SearchColumnGroup

These internal Class and ID can be changed by setting the XML Tag Name and Id properties.

In "Web Designer Classes & IDs", all Web Designer controls that can be influenced by style sheet rules are listed.

For example, suppose that an existing style sheet rule specifies that all buttons that belong to the ThreeDButton class have a three-dimensional outset border. Your current web site contains many buttons with this look. Here is the style sheet rule:

.ThreeDButton {
border-style: outset;
border-width: 2pt
}

In Web Designer, for each individual button you can specify that it must look like a ThreeDButton, by setting its general Class property to: ThreeDButton.

You can also specify for each Web Designer control an alternative Id property. For example, you can change the Id property of a LabelControl with default value 'Title' to 'Heading' because your existing web site already contains HTML elements with ID 'Heading' that have a specific look.

CAUTION: The default list of domain classes for a Web Designer class is NOT shown in the Property Inspector.