Quartex Pascal operates with a very efficient and clever theme system which makes it easy to have consistent behavior regardless of visual style. But, the world of the browser is sadly not as intuitively designed as native frameworks - so this topic needs some explaining.


When CSS was first introduced it allowed you to separate the structure of visual elements (e.g the tags) from how they looked. Initially you could only apply a single style to an element, which was enough for rudimentary documents. Its easy to forget that HTML is ultimately a document standard, it was never really designed to be the "application environment" it has become.


The CSS standard was quickly evolved to allow multiple styles to be attached to a single element, which is where the C in CSS comes from (cascading). Suddenly it was possible to isolate borders, backgrounds and effects as separate entities - and mix and match between these. Very useful compared to the old ways where you could only attach a single style.