Styles, Themes, and CSS

Abstract

User interface design challenges us to elegantly and functionally position layouts and controls while maintaining a coherent design and a consistent user experience across the entire application. This chapter is not about creating beautiful and visually appealing applications, which is an art in and of itself. This chapter explores beautiful and appealing ways to architect your UI code, separating the presentation from the content and structure using resources, styles, themes, and Cascading Style Sheets. Creating beautiful designs is a journey, and the purpose of this chapter is to take you on a journey from a simple but functional page to one that is also beautiful, dynamic, and maintainable. Reusability of UI code offers consistency of design, cleaner and more readable code, and the agility to change the look of the application over time.