Mike, I don't think the original post was describing a situation where edits to content required going back to the design team. Photoshop and ImageReady are fairly sophisticated with slice attributes. You are able to define regions of the PSD to contain no images, and an empty table cell is coded for you to drop your content into. Generally, people who use this method, generate a "draft" HTML template and then spend a few hours cleaning up the template before building pages from it. I think it's this "cleanup" stage that Paul is hoping to reduce. Once this cleanup and page-building is done, editing a non-image area of the site does not involve going back to the PSD. At least I hope that's what Paul is saying. Otherwise, it's madness!
As far as a way to generate CSS instead of tables from ImageReady... ImageReady CS2 is a step toward it (not sure about previous versions). You would certainly still need to tweak and adjust the output, but when saving a file as HTML, you can now specify to generate CSS instead of tables. You can even tell it to render XHTML-compliant code. Don't get me wrong, there is still a LOT of work to be done on the file after it is saved. ImageReady just wraps everything (images and text areas alike) in <div>s and positions them absolutely. No semantic meaning whatsoever. Either way, you will still have to re-write much of the code that comes from the design team. Caveat: I've never actually used this feature in ImageReady, I'm just aware that it exists. I'd never use ImageReady's CSS output in a production environment. Honestly, in order to create tableless layouts that are cross-browser and OS compatible, you have to dig in and learn CSS/XHTML. Fortunately, it's fun!! Tim __________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 8:45 AM To: css-d@lists.css-discuss.org Subject: Re: [css-d] Help my design team move away from nested tables If a page is composed entirely of a 'cut up' Photoshop image, what value is CSS? If the page is created and managed as a photoshop document, is there any useful presentation feature offered by CSS? There is no font control (sizing, face, etc.) there is no color control, there is no (real) hope of liquid layout, there is no alternate stylesheet. If marketing decides to 'tweak' the page, you're going back to the original photoshop document. I don't see how a site made of pages like this is much different than an interconnected PDF that pops up in your browser. Our webmaster draws pictures in photoshop and gets approval for pages using those images, then he'll create a FrontPage mockup - which is essentially the photoshop document polluted with Frontpage markup. The multipage mess is then handed over to me to "make functional" by adding infrastructure that should have been built first. Am I wrong to believe this is not a 'best practice' way to go about web design? (sorry for the wandering rant) ...Anyone have a favorite URL for 'best practice' web design? On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:58:36 +0300 "Nick Wilsdon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Paul wrote: > >> If we want to produce good clean markup using CSS we have the >> basically > rewrite much of the output from the design team. This seems like > double work, Considering this is more a tool issue than the fault of the designers. > What alternatives are there for this? > > > This tool doesn't exist, sorry Paul. It just sounds like you need a > web designer. You're essentially using Adobe ImageReady to 'make' your > web sites at the moment. Once they finally launch a 'CSS web designer > tool' then a lot of us are out of work! *g > > I have 2 people here (and myself) hand coding up the Photoshop layouts > from the designers - I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. > > There are tools which make working in CSS easier - TopStyle by Nick > Bradbury is one that really helps me. You can also pick up layouts at > glish.com and bluerobot.com which will save your team time. ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
