Is there an easy way to reload css without reloading the page?
Possibly not applicable for your situation, but here's the jQuery function I use for reloading external stylesheets:
/**
* Forces a reload of all stylesheets by appending a unique query string
* to each stylesheet URL.
*/
function reloadStylesheets() {
var queryString = '?reload=' + new Date().getTime();
$('link[rel="stylesheet"]').each(function () {
this.href = this.href.replace(/\?.*|$/, queryString);
});
}
On the "edit" page, instead of including your CSS in the normal way (with a <link>
tag), write it all to a <style>
tag. Editing the innerHTML
property of that will automatically update the page, even without a round-trip to the server.
<style type="text/css" id="styles">
p {
color: #f0f;
}
</style>
<textarea id="editor"></textarea>
<button id="preview">Preview</button>
The Javascript, using jQuery:
jQuery(function($) {
var $ed = $('#editor')
, $style = $('#styles')
, $button = $('#preview')
;
$ed.val($style.html());
$button.click(function() {
$style.html($ed.val());
return false;
});
});
And that should be it!
If you wanted to be really fancy, attach the function to the keydown on the textarea, though you could get some unwanted side-effects (the page would be changing constantly as you type)
Edit: tested and works (in Firefox 3.5, at least, though should be fine with other browsers). See demo here: http://jsbin.com/owapi
There is absolutely no need to use jQuery for this. The following JavaScript function will reload all your CSS files:
function reloadCss()
{
var links = document.getElementsByTagName("link");
for (var cl in links)
{
var link = links[cl];
if (link.rel === "stylesheet")
link.href += "";
}
}