More on styling

[James Margaris <jm...@nexaweb.com>]

So the styling stuff works well with our buttons and labels and things like that. I said I would look into Dojo and that is a bit more complicated.

Dojo widgets already have their own classnames. Some of these get pretty specific, for example changing the left and right border images on a tab in a tab container. I don't think it is worth the time and effort to try to rename these classes or change the scheme around. So when we make a tabPane we can give a class "xapTabPane" but it will also have a bunch of dojo classes on it.

One annoying thing about this is that there is no unified stylesheet for the dojo stuff, to figure out what each class is you have to experiment and look at each individual template file for each widget.

It is also going to be difficult to do something like have a different color when you roll over a tab, but no harder than it is to do in dojo normally.

Messing with the Dojo toolkit widgets a lot is probably not something we want to do, especially given that .4 has come out and we will want to upgrade to that (and beyond) at some point. My personal opinion is that in the long run it would be better to simply not use the Dojo widgets. They don't play well with other components and have some issues in general. (Touchy about size, image based looks that are hard to customize, etc) The base classes and general strategy for creating widgets is excellent but the end-user widgets themselves are merely average. (Again my opinion)

 

So the bottom line is that the states along with the formula based names are working well for components that we have mostly implemented, but not so well for components derived heavily from dojo widgets including window, tabPane, splitPane and menu stuff.

 

One thing we may want to do is pull the dojo classes out of the individual template CSS files that are most useful to end users and stick them in our general stylesheet, along with some different defaults possibly.

 

James Margaris

Re:RE: More on styling

[Michael Turyn <MT...@nexaweb.com>]

I got you beat James: another victim of the "hit reply to random message
without thinking that much," meme.

I forgot that .css stylesheets weren't replaced by .xml---change that
question to one about the value of building a class to transform Xap's
styles to Dojo's.


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Turyn [mailto:MTuryn@nexaweb.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2006 11:17 AM
To: xap-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: RE: More on styling

Would it be possible to use an XSL transform to map from our classes to
Dojo's?

RE: More on styling

[Michael Turyn <MT...@nexaweb.com>]

Would it be possible to use an XSL transform to map from our classes to
Dojo's?