Stuff and Nonsense

Malarkey is Andy Clarke, a UK based designer, author and speaker who has a passion for design, CSS and web accessibility.

Andy has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer and author and he founded Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. Andy regularly writes about creating beautiful, accessible web sites and he speaks at events worldwide. Andy is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, published by New Riders in 2006.

IOTBS: Look Who's Switching Too

Evil genius Brothercake has been busy in his secret laboratory and the result is a full new release of our stylesheet switcher, Invasion of The Body Switchers: Look Who's Switching Too.

Evil genius Brothercake has been busy in his secret laboratory and the result is a chicken with eight legs massive update to IOTBS - a full new version 2 release entitled 'IOTBS: Look Who's Switching Too'.

What is Invasion of the Body Switchers

Invasion of the Body Switchers (IOTBS) is an efficient object-oriented style sheet switcher, which offers independent switching of multiple media types, and supports an unlimited number of options and controls. It works in all modern graphical browsers except Mac/IE5 (with javascript enabled), and is available in a range of modes and interfaces:

A three headed monster

IOTBS now comes with three interface options.

• Original Forms and selectors version
• The Director's Cut: Definition-lists and links
• The Radio Edit: Forms, legends and radios

You can now also nominate one of your switcher controls to integrate with native stylesheet switching. The chosen control will then work off multiple <link> elements, using traditional 'alternate stylesheet semantics' and toggling the disabled properties. This means that changes made from the IOTBS switcher control are reflected in the browser's Page Style menu and in Firefox (and other mozilla browsers) it works in both directions - so changes made from the Page Style menu will update and save the settings in IOTBS.

To improve the overall efficiency and portability of the code, the scripting has been split into multiple files, so for any given installation you would now use three scripts (configuration, core functions, and interface-specific functions). The script now initialises before window.onload, thanks to a cunning new technique developed by Brothercake for running DOM scripting independently of that event. This means that the script can start while images and other dependencies are still loading, which significantly reduces the time for user-styles to take effect.

Get the script

Download the IOTBS2 zip file (110Kb), read the manual or read more on the IOTBS resources page and on Cake's IOTBS pages.

Replies

1. #1 On April 17, 2005 05:55 PM Rob Mientjes said:

   Oh, you guys just couldn't let go, could you? I must say that the Firefox integration is an awesome feature, by the way. Good stuff.

   Are you planning on yet another crappy sequel name just to tease the lovers of good movies, or should we expect a spinoff series?

2. #2 On April 17, 2005 06:01 PM Sasi said:

   could not download the zip file, maybe wrong adress

3. #3 On April 17, 2005 06:11 PM Malarkey said:

   @ Sasi: (Ed says: Sorry, I've corrected Malarkey's silly mistake and sent him to his room. The file is there for you now.)

4. #4 On April 17, 2005 06:58 PM byran said:

   how is this different from stylemod

5. #5 On April 17, 2005 09:57 PM Andrea Arbogast said:

   Great. Just when I thought I was done playing with new features this weekend, and was actually going to be able to go _outside_ and take a walk. Thanks a lot Malarkey. ;)

6. #6 On April 18, 2005 12:38 AM Tom said:

   That is smoooth. Very nice work.