UIBinder: how to structure CSS layout for designers

Our webapp is implemented in GWT 2.2, with heavy use of UIBinder. I really like UIBinder's ability to define styles either inline with the HTML, or at least in a <ui:style> section. As a programmer, this modularity really appeals to me, as it puts the styling right where it's used.

And for styles that are used in more than one place, I refactor them to a CommonStyles.css/CommonStyles.java, and refer to that in my *.ui.xml files.

This has worked great so far, but now the company has contracted an HTML/CSS designer to re-work the design. We spent a few days trying to get him up to speed on Eclipse & GWT, without much success. To meet a deadline, we ended up having him just deliver an old-school giant CSS file to us, which we then painstakingly refactored back into the various ui.xml modules.

My 开发者_JAVA百科question: Is it better to maintain a single, old-fashioned giant CSS file for a UIBinder app, so that designers can work with it? It pains me as a programmer to do things this way, but it seems like it's the only practical way to have non-programmers work on the design.

Is it unreasonable to expect designers to know an IDE such as Eclipse or Intellij?

From the perspective of the programmer of a company with one programmer and one designer:

The designer on my team never used eclipse or Java before our current project. We started using UiBinder stuff heavily about two months ago and, with maybe a couple of hours of help from me, he's managed to become quite proficient. He's now checking finished & laid out widgets into the source himself, with perfect CssResource etc modularization. I still set up the corresponding .css and .java files for him, but then I throw the setup at him, he writes 90% of the ui.xml & .css bit himself, and I come back and implement his ui in java afterwards. Occasionally I have to change a <div> to a <g:Panel> or whatever. He has not complained about it being too hard. Now he's starting to explore the extensions to css that gwt provides, like constants and expressions.

I'd say you shouldn't have to give up the benefits of UiBinder for the sake of your designers. In my own project, I expect to have to set up all of the code and generate templates for all of the Java interfaces, but I expect my partner to be able to add his own styles, separate css intelligently (e.g. CommonStyles.java vs. ThisWidgetStyles.java), and understand what's happening when his style names turn into GVDWK.