[Ur] serving css from urweb

[Adam Chlipala]

I've just pushed a changeset (to the public Ur/Web repo) which adds a 
[show] type class instance for [css_class].  The idea of using this 
sends a chill down my spine, but the customer is always right. :)


This idea of absolutely maximizing the ease of distributing "standalone 
apps" is a new one to me.  I didn't expect it to be important to 
people.  I'm working now (with a few others from this list) on a 
commercial consulting job, developing an application for a customer.  
The application is fully self-contained within a Mercurial repository, 
but not all parts of that repo are processed by Ur/Web.  Instead, a 
top-level README file gives 3 lines of Apache configuration that will 
"mount" the static files and set up proxying to an urweb-produced 
executable.  This seems so close to 0 cost that it's not worth worrying 
about improvements.  I see clear advantages compared to generating CSS 
styling in Ur/Web; for instance, the ability to edit CSS code with a 
nice Emacs mode, rather than working within Ur/Web string literals.

For the last 10 years, I've been doing web programming only in 
languages/frameworks that I've built myself, so I'm a bit out of touch 
with the standard expectations in that field today. :)  Do frameworks 
today all come with tools for distributing dynamic and static content 
together with "one click deployment," or are folks on this list 
expecting more from Ur/Web because of its closer integration with CSS, etc.?