I wan't developers who embed my webapp to be able to pass a param in the url like ?style=dark which will alter the css accordingly. Is there a better way to keep this setting as the user navigates than appending ?style=dark to all links?
I've considered cookies etc. but if one user is viewing two pages which embed my app with different themes then one will override the other.
I'm using Python/Django.
I'm not exactly sure, but anyway you would have to pass this variable to your site. With that I mean, that there is no difference if you add ?style=dark to your href's, or rel="dark" to your <a>'s for use with javascript. keep in mind that it's just an example
Ofcourse you can always work on that AI to predict what the user wanted at the specific moment. hehe
I'm sure you can use a Session for this kind of thing, not? The first time the values are provided via the Querystring you add them to the Session and then retrieve them from the session in the future.
If you neither want to use Cookies nor Sessions and do not want to embed it into URLs, the only alternatives which comes to my mind are:
First the most generic: Use a dummy domain in front. Instead of www.example.com use h**p://THEME.example.com/PATH. This even works for HTTPS if you own a wildcard SSL for *.example.com.
A second variant would be to create a Basic-Auth-Handler which uses the Theme as the username with a dummy password. The URL then can look like:
h**p://[email protected]/PATH
However I am NOT sure what happens if a user connects to the same site with two different themes in the Basic-Auth-case. Also it is somewhat tricky to make the site available for search engines if it is behind an authentication handler. This is because you MUST have an auth-handler today to circumvent the Anti-Phishing-protection in modern browsers.
Note that with both methods you can only have one parameter easily. The password does not count and there are browsers out there which do not accept a wildcard SSL cert *.example.com for PARAM1.PARAM2.example.com.