--- /dev/null
+It would be great if IkiWiki could apply some sort of preprocessing to
+CSS. I'm just "thinking out loud" at the moment, but I might write
+a plugin.
+
+The simplest starting point would be concatenating a list of files:
+
+* The actiontabs and monochrome themes are not ready for use as-is;
+ the Makefile constructs the real stylesheet by concatenating the
+ anti-theme's CSS and the relevant theme's CSS. It would be better
+ if they could just drop a file in an underlay, and IkiWiki would
+ concatenate the anti-theme stylesheet and the theme's file.
+
+* The blueview theme is the same, but the theme's CSS also starts
+ with a couple of stylesheets from YUI. IkiWiki could maybe
+ concatenate the anti-theme stylesheet, the two YUI stylesheets
+ and the blueview-specific part? Or maybe that's too complicated.
+
+* The goldtype theme is the blueview theme with some overrides
+ added to the end. Again, IkiWiki could concatenate all the pieces.
+
+* The [[plugins/contrib/album]] plugin needs to append some
+ stuff to the stylesheet, making its installation more involved
+ than it ought to be. If it could append the pieces by putting them
+ in an underlay, installation would just be a matter of "add
+ the files".
+
+I'm not sure whether local.css should be concatenated too, or whether
+it should be separate.
+
+It would also be great if the same mechanism could be extended
+to compile CSS-like languages like [[!debpkg ruby-sass desc=SASS]]
+or [[!debpkg node-less desc=LESS]] down to CSS, but for dependency
+reasons, I don't think the themes shipped with IkiWiki should rely on that.
+
+If the compiled CSS ended up with a content-based filename (perhaps
+ikiwiki/compiled-HASH.css where HASH is the (possibly truncated) MD5 or SHA1
+hash of the content), that would mitigate stale CSS being served from cache
+(as long as the HTML has a short expiry, which is desirable anyway),
+and ikiwiki-hosting could maybe even do something like this to allow
+long-term caching of the files with content-based names:
+
+ <LocationMatch /ikiwiki/compiled-[a-f0-9]+\.css>
+ ExpiresByType text/css "now plus 1 year"
+ </LocationMatch>
+
+A similar mechanism could maybe be used to minify JavaScript.
+
+## vague syntax proposal: controlled by directive
+
+ \[[!css files="""
+ style.css
+ ikiwiki/plugin*.css
+ ikiwiki/theme*.css
+ local.css
+ """]]
+
+* *css* directive, placed in any page, concatenates the given files
+ and uses them as the stylesheet for that page and its subpages,
+ replacing `<TMPL_VAR BASEURL>style.css`
+
+* the files can be globs, which are sorted lexicographically within
+ a glob, and do not have to match anything (so it's OK if you don't
+ have anything that matches `plugin*.css`); "-" happens to sort
+ before ".", so theme-base.css would sort before theme.css,
+ which is nice to have
+
+* the default would be `style.css`, then `ikiwiki/plugin*.css`,
+ then `ikiwiki/theme*.css` and maybe `local.css`, as in the
+ example above
+
+* `style.css` would continue to be the anti-theme
+
+* themes would ship `ikiwiki/theme.css` instead of `style.css`,
+ resulting in concatenation
+
+* goldtype would ship `ikiwiki/theme-base.css` (which is a copy of
+ blueview, or a symlink to blueview if we can make symlinks safe)
+ and `ikiwiki/theme.css` (which is the goldtype additions)
+
+* [[plugins/contrib/album]] would put its templates and
+ `ikiwiki/plugin-album.css` in an underlay
+
+* any non-contrib plugin with complicated CSS requirements
+ could also move its CSS to an underlay
+
+I think this could be done entirely in a plugin, except for this
+change to `page.tmpl` to allow the `<style>`s to be overridden:
+
+ <TMPL_IF COMPILED_CSS>
+ <style type="text/css" href="<TMPL_VAR BASEURL><TMPL_VAR COMPILED_CSS>" />
+ <TMPL_ELSE>
+ <!-- ... what it does now ... -->
+ </TMPL_IF>
+
+The plugin could also optionally minify its output, and either pass input
+files through an external SASS/SCSS/LESS implementation according
+to their extension, or have a hook system to do so.
+
+People who want SASS/LESS would probably just do this in their top-level page:
+
+ \[[!css files="mywiki.less"]]
+
+and do the inclusion/concatenation logic via @import.
+
+Security consideration: the SASS/LESS compilers will read arbitrary local
+files, so if you use those languages, ability to upload the appropriate
+extension would have to be locked-down. Perhaps it's better to implement
+this without that feature initially.
+
+--[[smcv]]