status on leather-dev?

[Diwaker Gupta <di...@gmail.com>]

Hi everyone,

Sometime back there was a discussion on the list on whether to keep
leather purely syntactic (i.e., use containers and named CSS elements
without attaching any notions of containment or placement in the skin
itself). The problem we were facing back then was that CSS is not very
good with absolute placement, and so keeping the skin purely syntactic
and doing all positioning with CSS was not working out very well (as
anyone using leather has seen -- particular notorious with the
"floating" search box and the weirdly placed menu)

So whats the status on leather now? Are we still with the purely
syntactic model? I really liked the idea implemented in scale-dev,
which honored CSS named elements (branding etc), but also included
some semantic notion of containment within the skin itself (like the
search box going inside the header etc) to make CSS skinning easier.

TIA
-- 
Diwaker Gupta
http://resolute.ucsd.edu/diwaker

Re: status on leather-dev?

[Thorsten Scherler <th...@apache.org>]

Hi Diwaker,

leather-dev is dead long live view/viewHelper. ;-)

I made a screen shot of the view plugin (using the viewHelper plugin).
http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/forrest/trunk/site-author/content/xdocs/docs/images/snapshot-view-viewHelper.png?view=markup

The viewHelper is using the markup and css elements from scale-dev. 

...but I reckon the css would need some patches. ;-)

salu2
thorsten

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 14:24 -0800, Diwaker Gupta wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Sometime back there was a discussion on the list on whether to keep
> leather purely syntactic (i.e., use containers and named CSS elements
> without attaching any notions of containment or placement in the skin
> itself). The problem we were facing back then was that CSS is not very
> good with absolute placement, and so keeping the skin purely syntactic
> and doing all positioning with CSS was not working out very well (as
> anyone using leather has seen -- particular notorious with the
> "floating" search box and the weirdly placed menu)
> 
> So whats the status on leather now? Are we still with the purely
> syntactic model? I really liked the idea implemented in scale-dev,
> which honored CSS named elements (branding etc), but also included
> some semantic notion of containment within the skin itself (like the
> search box going inside the header etc) to make CSS skinning easier.
> 
> TIA
-- 
thorsten

"Together we stand, divided we fall!" 
Hey you (Pink Floyd)

Re: status on leather-dev?

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Thorsten Scherler wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 14:24 -0800, Diwaker Gupta wrote:

>>So whats the status on leather now? 
> 
> 
> See above I am still working on the fbits-plugin but I hope to have a
> proof of concept pipeline for leather pretty soon (hopefully this
> weekend). That  makes it possible that other devs to help me finishing
> the stuff because some of us need as well this features, am I right. ;-)

I need a solution on a forthcoming project, so I will certainly help. I 
saw your stuff go into SVN last weekend, not had chance to look at it 
yet, but I will be much freer in a couple of weeks (it always seems to 
be "a couple of weeks"), so once 0.7 is released this will get my focus.

Ross

Re: status on leather-dev?

[Thorsten Scherler <th...@apache.org>]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 14:24 -0800, Diwaker Gupta wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Sometime back there was a discussion on the list on whether to keep
> leather purely syntactic (i.e., use containers and named CSS elements
> without attaching any notions of containment or placement in the skin
> itself). The problem we were facing back then was that CSS is not very
> good with absolute placement, and so keeping the skin purely syntactic
> and doing all positioning with CSS was not working out very well (as
> anyone using leather has seen -- particular notorious with the
> "floating" search box and the weirdly placed menu)
> 

I am working on the fbits-plugin to solve this problem. I implemented a
proof of concept pipeline so far. The idea for leather is to request all
needed css elements via a forrest:view from the fbits-plugin. 

leather
*******
forrest:view -> fbits-plugin -> xhtml

This makes it possible to place the CSS elements like the designer wants
and solve the problems that you describe.

> So whats the status on leather now? 

See above I am still working on the fbits-plugin but I hope to have a
proof of concept pipeline for leather pretty soon (hopefully this
weekend). That  makes it possible that other devs to help me finishing
the stuff because some of us need as well this features, am I right. ;-)

> Are we still with the purely
> syntactic model? 

Internally yes, but the html-skeleton will be created out of the
forrest:view. Trying to say the designer can place the elements where he
wants in the page (in DOM structure).

> I really liked the idea implemented in scale-dev,
> which honored CSS named elements (branding etc), but also included
> some semantic notion of containment within the skin itself (like the
> search box going inside the header etc) to make CSS skinning easier.
> 

I said in the discussion that I will include scale-dev as default
implementation for leather and I am still planing to do so. It is in our
Issue Tracker and will use it as soon it makes sense.

> TIA

To you, thanks for the reminder. ;-)

salu2
-- 
thorsten

"Together we stand, divided we fall!" 
Hey you (Pink Floyd)