Apex theme fun

Sometimes you are working with an off-the-shelf product and find something odd, and you're not quite sure whether it is a bug, a feature or whether you've lost the plot.

I use Oracle's Application Express, and was digging into the included theme_18. The templates refer to classes "t18success" and "t18notification"

And then I go looking into the CSS and see hash / ID selectors.

#t18Success{margin:5px auto;font-size:12px;color:#333;background:#DAEED2;width:600px;background-repeat:no-repeat;padding:5px;border:1px #95C682 solid;border-right:none;border-left:none;}

#t18Notification{margin:5px auto;padding:5px;font-size:12px;color:#333;text-align:center;vertical-align:top;border:1px #ffd700 solid;border-right:none;border-left:none;background-color:#ffffcc;width:600px;}

For added confusion, HTML class names are case-sensitive, but CSS selectors are case-insensitive, so the case differences may or may not be relevant.

The application looks nicer if I change the CSS to class selectors, and then I get coloured, dismissable boxes rather than hard to read, unstyled messages. I could probably get the same effect by changing the id="MESSAGE" in the templates, but that seems riskier. At least with the CSS, I am confident that I am just changing the appearance and it shouldn't affect the logic.

Digging deeper, the CSS for more than a dozen of the built-in themes utilise the ID selector "#notification-message" in the CSS. About half a dozen have only a class selector, and another three have both (with the prefix of t followed by the theme number). Finally three just have the ID selector with the theme prefix.

My gut feel is that they switched from the ID to the class selectors stopping in various places on the way. And some of those places aren't very pretty.

I'm not sure I see the benefit in having the theme number embedded in templates and selectors. The template tells it which theme CSS file to get, and as long as the template and CSS are consistent, the use of the theme number just seems to add more place you have to edit when you want to customise a theme.

This was all checked on a fresh Apex 4.0 instance because I just installed the new Windows 64-bit version of Oracle Express Edition. I'll do an upgrade of that default to the latest 4.2 this weekend too.