Re: Eclipse 3.3.1 .... and stuff

From: Jerry W. Walker (jerrywwalke..mail.com)
Date: Thu Oct 04 2007 - 09:25:04 EDT

  • Next message: David LeBer: "Re: Eclipse 3.3.1 .... and stuff"

    Hi, Mike,

    On Oct 4, 2007, at 8:19 AM, Mike Schrag wrote:

    >> - some sort of box around the block elements, and the ability to
    >> click on them to select them (yes, just like WO builder) so you
    >> can scroll to the end of that one and see what's next
    > I've tried out a bunch of various visualizations ... When I talk
    > trash about WO Builder, one of the major things I talk about is
    > that it doesn't do CSS. This is actually sort of true of this new
    > preview (I say "sort of", because mine is hardcoded at the moment
    > to do my own CSS -- I'm working on some tricks to do static
    > analysis of components to figure out which CSS files should be
    > used .. this is a very weird problem). In old WOB land, drawing
    > borders is not a big of a deal, because without CSS, page flow is
    > much more linear. The problem with a more modern page is that CSS
    > does all sorts of complicated layout, and you can't just draw boxes
    > around things anymore. I had a version that drew boxes and it's
    > completely useless because divs collapse from floated contents,
    > stuff moves all around -- it's just insane. Take a modern CSS page
    > and add border: 1px solid blue; to all of your elements and you'll
    > essentially see what I mean. The other particularly nasty problem
    > is tables ... The most common use of tables is to put a
    > WORepetition around them. But you can't just draw a box around
    > that WORepetition, because there is no element you can put in a
    > table that surrounds a <tr> tag (browsers push these things below
    > or above the table if you try to inject bogus tags around <tr>'s).
    > This preview is rendering with WebKit (on OS X), so we're still
    > constrained by the definition of HTML. I have no idea how to fix
    > this one at the moment ... For containment right now, I do rollover
    > background color changes with alpha channel, so when you rollover a
    > container, it turns light blue, and when you rollover a
    > subcontainer of that container, it turns a slightly darker blue
    > (because of the compounding alpha).

    Have you ever used Xyle Scope? I've found it incredibly helpful in
    parsing HTML/CSS pages for modification and refinement.

         http://www.culturedcode.com/xyle/

    I guess the best way to describe it is as a CSS viewer. Here's a
    graphic from their web site that shows what it does:


    Screenshot_en.jpg

    You might take a look at the demo for ideas, if you're interested, to
    see various ways that they show the source, the cascade and the layout.

    I emailed their CEO a while back to see if they might be interested
    in modifying/customizing their product into a WOBuilder like tool,
    but it was hard to make any business case for their doing so and they
    had new projects already planned.

    Sorry I haven't taken the opportunity more often to say what an
    awesome job I think you and the rest of the Wonder team are doing for
    the community but I've been under some intense production pressures
    recently.

    Regards,
    Jerry 

    --
__ Jerry W. Walker,
    WebObjects Developer/Instructor for High Performance Industrial  
Strength Internet Enabled Systems

         jerrywwalke..ee-em-aye-eye-ell.com
     203 278-4085        office

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