On 4-Oct-07, at 9:25 AM, Jerry W. Walker wrote:
> 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.
Ditto on Xyle Scope!
Ditto, ditto, ditto, double dog dare ditto!
I have to say that it's tools like Xyle Scope (and CSSEdit) that keep
me from caring too much about the abilities of Component editor.
I usually build my pages with lists and basic divs (and I rely on
lots of components) and then spend most of my ui time with the app
running with real data in a browser or Xyle Scope. Tweak, reload,
rinse repeat.
;david
-- David LeBer Codeferous Software 'co-def-er-ous' adj. Literally 'code-bearing' site: http://codeferous.com blog: http://davidleber.net profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidleber -- Toronto Area Cocoa / WebObjects developers group: http://tacow.org
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