Working on my site design I thought it would be nice to have user selectable stylesheets, say a black text on white background or white text on black background. Once I had this working in development mode I ran into the problem with the stylesheet being cached.

In my implementation the user sets a cookie by visiting a url and being redirected back to the original page. The routing then returned different content for the /stylesheet/screen.css based on the cookie.

From my Sinatra routes:

get '/set_css/:style' do
   ## Set style with /set_css/light?ref=/article
  response.set_cookie("style", { :value => params[:style], :path => '/'} ) 

  if params[:ref].nil? or params[:ref] == '' 
    redirect '/'
  else
    redirect params[:ref]
  end
end

The CSS routes, using sass for rendering

get '/stylesheets/screen.css' do
  content_type 'text/css', :charset => 'utf-8'
  response['Expires'] = (Time.now + 60*60*24*356).httpdate
  if request.cookies['style'] == 'light'
    sass(:"stylesheets/light_screen" ) 
  else
    sass(:"stylesheets/dark_screen" ) 
  end
end

The problem mentioned earlier is that the header is set to cache the page for a year. This means that the user would need to force a full webpage refresh. This does not happen automatically using the route which sets the cookie and redirect.

An easy solution to for this is using the cookie to directly load a different named stylesheet. Each stylesheet will get cached but they are different assets to the browser. For my web app I move the if statment into layouts.erb.

Stylesheet routes back to:

get '/stylesheets/:name.css' do
  content_type 'text/css', :charset => 'utf-8'
  response['Expires'] = (Time.now + 60*60*24*356).httpdate
  sass(:"stylesheets/#{params[:name]}" ) 
end

Inside my layout.erb

<head>
  <% if request.cookies['style'] == 'light' -%>
  <link href="/stylesheets/light_screen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection"/>
  <% else -%>
  <link href="/stylesheets/dark_screen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection"/>
  <% end -%>
 </head>

The style selection menu:

<ul>
  <li><a href="/set_css/light?ref=<%=request.fullpath%>">Light</a></li>
  <li><a href="/set_css/dark?ref=<%=request.fullpath%>">Dark</a></li>
</ul>