dhempy
Posts: 40
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| Posted: 07/15/2004, 6:51 PM |
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Lovin' CodeCharge Studio! I just created my first commercial project that felt like I was using it as it was intended...10 minutes to a published, working app that maintains two tables.
One area that has struck me as a big setback is the way CCS uses css. (I'll say "Studio" and "stylesheets" from here on out to avoid confusion.)
It appears that the designers of Studio's themes have been working with tables and font tags far too long. (As we all have!) Good to see that stylesheets are being used, but they're pretty much just being used to replace all the font and table tags, with no improvements. They pretty much ignore the most powerful aspect of cascading style sheets: cascading. Using inheritance really improves the design, maintainability, simplicity, not to mention page size in extreme cases.
For example, this is a common title for a grid as Studio generates it:
<font class="KnockoutFormHeaderFont">List of Subjects </font>
Darned near every bit of text on the page has the same kind of font markup. If I asked one of our graphic designers to redesign the code as it is now, they'd get frustrated and I'd get grumpy. Furthermore, there is absolutely no chance of using existing site-wide style sheets with all the custom class selectors Studio generates. If it wasn't for the beauty of code generation, changing that later on would be tedious.
If we're going to use stylesheets, that title should simply be:
<h2>List of Subjects </h2>
Then our graphic designers can go to town making the page look just about any way they want. Not only will they not have to tinker with the code, they won't even have to touch the templates.
As if that wasn't enough, consider aural browsers, spiders and such that know what <h2> means, but not a clue about class="KnockoutFormHeaderFont" is. As a state agency, have have legal obligations concering accessability issues for disabled people, so I'm very keen on this issue.
Now I'm no style expert (in code or in person  ), but I would suggest Studio should generate something along these lines:
<div class="whole_page" id="student_whole_page">
....blah, blah...happy text and headers go here....
<div class="search" id="student_search">
...code for the "Search Students" search tool goes here...
</div>
<div class="grid" id="student_grid">
...code for the "List of Students" grid goes here...
</div>
....footers go here...
</div>
The code within the <div>'s could be completely free of class= and id= selectors, or very close to it. Simply use tags like <h1> <h2> <h3> for titles, <table> for tables, especially <th> for the header row of a table, and <ul> for single-column lists, and you're in like Flynn! Define how those tags look once within div.whole_page and you're 95% done. div.search and div.grid might need some custom markup, but probably not much if any. If you need something special in one particular place, you can certainly have the generated code use class or id selectors, but that shoudl be the exception, not the standard way to mark up each of a hundred rows. For example, this makes sense:
<span class="warning">{error}</span>
When a custom treatment is required for one component in a project, a human designer (or Studio) can define the styles for div#student_grid to be different than div#course_grid. But for the most part all the styles would likely be defined in div.grid
Give it some thought, and hire a *good* stylesheet designer with *great* data organization skills to help you implement this. It will make your product much more valuable to developers who deal with designers.
And I'll be a happier man. 
-dave
_________________
David Hempy
Director of Broadcast and Education Technology
Kentucky Educational Television
800-333-9764 |
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peterr
Posts: 5971
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| Posted: 07/15/2004, 10:03 PM |
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David,
The stylesheets/Themes are currently being simplified.
I'm also not a style expert but I think that in the past possibly we tried to offer too much flexibility, including multiple styles per page, with different styles for different forms and even for different controls. And since the styles are defined as Themes we're talking about multiple .css files per page.
Plus CCS/IDE allows changes from one style/Theme to another, which could require clear identification of each style for each component.
In the future we plan to offer simplified Themes, almost as you described, but probably at the cost of loosing some of the current flexibility (unless we'd implement an HTML parser to "see" the styles the way that browser would, but I don't think we can go that far.)
Thanks for your comments.
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Peter R.
YesSoftware Forums Moderator
For product support please visit http://support.yessoftware.com |
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pc-homepage
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| Posted: 08/03/2004, 11:35 AM |
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Dhempy's comments echo mine exactly. As awful as it is, Dreamweaver has the world by the tail as far as stylesheets are concerned. One shouldn't have to resort to a different editor just to do what CCS should be able to do itself. As great as it is, the lack of proper stylesheet control is a huge shortcoming and cannot be addresses by "simplifying" the existing stylesheet implementation.
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peterr
Posts: 5971
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| Posted: 08/03/2004, 1:03 PM |
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Sorry, what do you mean by "lack of proper stylesheet control" in CCS?
Once CCS creates a stylesheet for an application (whether simplified or not) then it is the standard stylesheet that uses the same style as any other, and can be modified in Dreamweaver. There is no difference here between any tools or applications.
Possibly I misunderstand something, but I do not see too many other methods of working with stylesheets.
May I ask what do you have in mind?
_________________
Peter R.
YesSoftware Forums Moderator
For product support please visit http://support.yessoftware.com |
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Karsten
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| Posted: 08/10/2004, 7:19 AM |
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first of all i talk about 2.3
I have to agree the speakers above,
i had big problems (still have) with the design builder
for example i copy a existing theme and want to modify it
i modify it but in html design view is not changed what is changed in
css style view and vice versa.Also it sems has some bugs
deleting some applied styles out of the CSS file (happend with
bgcolor for table for me,deleting color to empty textbox shown no result in CSS file)
also if i changed my CSS style (right side of the designerthingy)
to what it should look like, it is not applied in designview , it can only be
seen in live view.
overall i want to call this "Inaccesibility" its a pain to build a new theme
that works like an existing one does.
for example: copy AQUA theme and now try to but a backgroundpicture for the Form table  or try to change color of FieldCaptionTD *g
then try use it in development design-view
have fun.....
i hope this will be accesible soon, if so i really consider to buy CCS
i use still the trial for now .Ii see this development enviroment has much potential.
Karsten from germany
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peterr
Posts: 5971
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| Posted: 08/10/2004, 12:04 PM |
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I think that there is some mixup here of Themes and CSS/stylesheets.
Possibly Themes could use some improvement, but this is not the same as the generated stylesheets (which are the output of Themes).
Thus I stated that I don't understand the statements of pc-homepage because stylesheets are stylesheets and are the same everywhere, including DreamWeaver, CCS, or basically a Web page.
As for Themes, we could possibly discuss, review and improve:
- stylesheet definitions contained in Themes
- the interface used to create Themes
- the methods of replacing Themes (or rather Theme-specific stylessheets) within the generated page
Therefore we have 4 different topics, and I may be little confused when each person describes something else but says "I agree with the others"
This looks like a good start to discuss somethng, and I would appreciate if all comments are divided into the separate topics that they apply to.
This would definitely help us understand your concerns and make related product improvements.
Thanks
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Peter R.
YesSoftware Forums Moderator
For product support please visit http://support.yessoftware.com |
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peterr
Posts: 5971
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| Posted: 08/10/2004, 1:13 PM |
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Karsten,
BTW, I forwarded your comments to our staff for closer analysis.
Thank you.
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Peter R.
YesSoftware Forums Moderator
For product support please visit http://support.yessoftware.com |
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Yuri
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| Posted: 08/20/2004, 4:28 PM |
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My biggest problem with Themes & css is CodeChargeStudio's interface for editing Themes.
All you need is to re-design it to have something similar to TopStyle Pro by Bradbury Software which is the top choice of all designers.
Even Dreamweaver users prefer to use TopStyle Pro (it can be set as external style editor)
If I want to edit a Theme I want to click ONE time to have a full-screen interface with all the information about the current Theme and live preview.
Why do I need to have 5-6 small windows with confusing interface on the top of each other?
Why you can't use your main existing layout:
left pane for listing of classes,
middle pane for css code & preview (toggle);
properties pane - for visual editing of properties (as it is in TopStyle Pro)
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peterr
Posts: 5971
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| Posted: 08/24/2004, 2:30 PM |
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Yuriy, thanks for your comments. They are quite clear. I'll forward these to our team.
_________________
Peter R.
YesSoftware Forums Moderator
For product support please visit http://support.yessoftware.com |
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