> SiteGrinder (http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder/) from Media Lab is a > tool that does this. SiteGrinder takes layered Photoshop designs and > outputs them as working CSS pages. However, as it uses absolute > positioning for page elements, it may or may not be a perfect solution > on its own. But as part of an overall workflow that starts in > Photoshop, you might find it useful. A demo of this Photoshop plug-in > is available. The company also produces a nifty Dreamweaver extension > for quickly making rounded corner doodads of all types.
I am sorry, but it doesn't really matter if the generated code is nested tables or absolutely positioned DIVs. The point is that a web page is structured text with CSS as presentation and maybe some JS as behaviour. The demo page of sitegrinder for example is a bunch of DIVs with _empty_ links and images as backgrounds. Search engines, users without images and text browser users (or text to speech software) will get nothing whatsoever, you might as well take a screenshot and use it as a background. It might be a handy tool to deliver clickthrough wireframes, but this is not a web page generator. Even as a wireframing tool it is rather dangerous, as clients will be miffed when they see that the final product does look a lot different than the cool photoshop clickthrough. I think if we start thinking of web sites as entities of content delivered through a certain channel - HTML and CSS - instead of Photoshop layouts, then we have a chance to create successful, beautiful and accessible / globally available pages. I have not encountered any project in the last 4 years that did not mushroom from a "just five quick HTML pages" into a CMS driven site with > 40 pages. The more flexible we plan, the less time and money gets wasted ditching generated or shoddily copied and pasted code. Tools like this one stand in the way of us trying to get across that websites do need content that keeps getting maintained/translated/converted to really offer something for the visitor. Modern web design is flexible, and can cater for different media and needs. This is not much better than one of the older illustration tools, that had a "convert to HTML" that generated one massive GIF with an imagemap. There is no word macro to write a book for you and there is no Photoshop filter to generate a company CI, why should there be a tool that can do what we've been struggling with in the last 8-9 years? My guess is that a lot of our problems (budgets, funding, time-lines) is because of a lot of software is promising to deliver what we do as webdesigners with the click of a button. The other problem is that negative feedback never reaches the stakeholders - annoyed surfers simply go somewhere else. -- Chris Heilmann Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com Writing: http://icant.co.uk/ Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/ ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
