Drupal With CSS Limitations
Drupal is a free, open-source content management system that helps users design websites using Drupal's user interface and modular theming. Drupal uses both PHP and CSS; PHP creates the architecture of the website and CSS gives it style. Even though Drupal features thousands of free themes to style your website, programmers and designers can adjust the styles, such as font color and paragraph line spacing, at an even deeper level by accessing the theme's CSS files.
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File Number Limitation
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A Drupal Web designer should test the Drupal-based website on multiple Internet browsers, especially Internet Explorer since it is among the top three most-used browsers available, according to W3Schools. But Internet Explorer restricts the number of stylesheets to 32, which end in .css, that a webpage can link to. A webpage in PHP derives its styles from the CSS files it links to in its <head> tags, which are usually found near the top of the index.php file. If more than 32 files are linked to, any beyond this threshold won't load.
File Size Limitation
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A Drupal theme developer needs to check the file size of the CSS files linking to the PHP code. Anything above 288 kilobytes cannot be read in Internet Explorer. CSS files may have hundreds and thousands of lines of code. There can be styles for navigation links on the right sidebar, the left side bar, the main menu and sub-menus; links within pages and across pages; to other sites or to other sections of the same site; and more. Styling for each of these links can include how the link looks when the cursor hovers over the link, when it's clicked on, when it hasn't been clicked on and when it's being activated. And all these styles are just for links. If a CSS file is getting too large, break the code up into another file and include a link to it in your PHP files or within the first CSS file.
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CSS Linking Limitations
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When trying to avoid overrunning the file size limitation, a Drupal designer may try to break up a large CSS file into two and then link one to another. Internet Explorer, however, won't read any CSS files that are the fourth or more in a chain of linked CSS files. In other words, if you have a main style sheet that links to a secondary style sheet that links to a third and a fourth and so on, any styles after the ones in the third style sheet won't appear on the website.
Line Code Limitation
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As of 2009, Drupal was used on over 200,000 websites on the Internet, leading to its use on brand name sites, including Warner Brothers Records and Yahoo Research. These complex sites can have very nuanced styling, which leads to thousands of lines of CSS code. But a CSS file cannot be more than four thousand lines long or it won't be parsed. Any Drupal site with CSS files that have more coding than this may break or not show the styles that the developer wants.
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