Skinning in ADF Faces is used to define user defined customizations with respect to one of the standard ADF skins. A skin is by and large a CSS document (CSS 3.0) that is interpreted at run time to generate the 'real' CSS documents (3.0 if that is what the browser can handle, 2.0 in most current cases) that will be sent to the browser. The real CSS document is influenced primarily by the server side Skin CSS (CSS 3.0 is converted to 2.0 if that is required) and also by factors like: browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, something else), version (5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0; 2.x, 3.x;…), operating system, locale, etc. The skin is created as an extension of one of three standard skins shipped with ADF Faces.

n this article I would point at an feature of skinning I was not aware of before: skin styles need not apply to all instances of a component (sort of my previous understanding) but can be directed at specific occurrences of components:

- all component instances that have a specific styleClass set - all component instances under a specific ancestor element (that may or may not have a specific styleClass set)

Let us discuss an example of these characteristics of skinning I was not aware of More >