Question

I’m trying to make a live, in-page css editor with a preview function that would reload the stylesheet and apply it without needing to reload the page. What would be the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

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