HeadStyle Helper The HTML <style> element is used to include CSS stylesheets inline in the HTML <head> element. Use HeadLink to link CSS files HeadLink should be used to create <link> elements for including external stylesheets. HeadStyle is used when you wish to define your stylesheets inline. The HeadStyle helper supports the following methods for setting and adding stylesheet declarations: appendStyle($content, $attributes = array()) offsetSetStyle($index, $content, $attributes = array()) prependStyle($content, $attributes = array()) setStyle($content, $attributes = array()) In all cases, $content is the actual CSS declarations. $attributes are any additional attributes you wish to provide to the style tag: lang, title, media, or dir are all permissible. Setting Conditional Comments HeadStyle allows you to wrap the style tag in conditional comments, which allows you to hide it from specific browsers. To add the conditional tags, pass the conditional value as part of the $attributes parameter in the method calls. Headstyle With Conditional Comments headStyle()->appendStyle($styles, array('conditional' => 'lt IE 7')); ]]> HeadStyle also allows capturing style declarations; this can be useful if you want to create the declarations programmatically, and then place them elsewhere. The usage for this will be showed in an example below. Finally, you can also use the headStyle() method to quickly add declarations elements; the signature for this is headStyle($content$placement = 'APPEND', $attributes = array()). $placement should be either 'APPEND', 'PREPEND', or 'SET'. HeadStyle overrides each of append(), offsetSet(), prepend(), and set() to enforce usage of the special methods as listed above. Internally, it stores each item as a stdClass token, which it later serializes using the itemToString() method. This allows you to perform checks on the items in the stack, and optionally modify these items by simply modifying the object returned. The HeadStyle helper is a concrete implementation of the Placeholder helper. UTF-8 encoding used by default By default, Zend Framework uses UTF-8 as its default encoding, and, specific to this case, Zend_View does as well. Character encoding can be set differently on the view object itself using the setEncoding() method (or the encoding instantiation parameter). However, since Zend_View_Interface does not define accessors for encoding, it's possible that if you are using a custom view implementation with this view helper, you will not have a getEncoding() method, which is what the view helper uses internally for determining the character set in which to encode. If you do not want to utilize UTF-8 in such a situation, you will need to implement a getEncoding() method in your custom view implementation. HeadStyle Helper Basic Usage You may specify a new style tag at any time: headStyle()->appendStyle($styles); ]]> Order is very important with CSS; you may need to ensure that declarations are loaded in a specific order due to the order of the cascade; use the various append, prepend, and offsetSet directives to aid in this task: headStyle()->offsetSetStyle(100, $customStyles); // place at end: $this->headStyle()->appendStyle($finalStyles); // place at beginning $this->headStyle()->prependStyle($firstStyles); ]]> When you're finally ready to output all style declarations in your layout script, simply echo the helper: headStyle() ?> ]]> Capturing Style Declarations Using the HeadStyle Helper Sometimes you need to generate CSS style declarations programmatically. While you could use string concatenation, heredocs, and the like, often it's easier just to do so by creating the styles and sprinkling in PHP tags. HeadStyle lets you do just that, capturing it to the stack: headStyle()->captureStart() ?> body { background-color: bgColor ?>; } headStyle()->captureEnd() ?> ]]> The following assumptions are made: The style declarations will be appended to the stack. If you wish for them to replace the stack or be added to the top, you will need to pass 'SET' or 'PREPEND', respectively, as the first argument to captureStart(). If you wish to specify any additional attributes for the <style> tag, pass them in an array as the second argument to captureStart().