On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 09:37:10AM +0100, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
For b), being dreamweaver-compatible would be a big plus, allowing less technical people to create templates themselves. Using Dreamweaver or not, that's not the point: DW-compatibility also means that the templating system is "simple enough" for such people to grasp.
Perhaps I am not the only person on this list that has never used DreamWeaver...
I've tried it once and I found my text editors to be way more productive. And power web designers use text editors too (or DW source mode), but that's a minority.
would anybody care to list or describe the how's and why's of its benefits and limitations?
For context, all I have managed to glean so far from this discussion is a vague idea that visual people like it,
What's critical in the discussion is that XSLT is not the right tool for content presentation. There are many exceptions but XSLT is a programming language with a markup syntax, it looks friendly at first and its template declarativity is easy to understand for HTML designers because of CSS selectors, but it's extremely verbose and, most of all, it's not supported by visual HTML tools (or, it if is, in a very poor way).
What I want is to be able to have HTML people design the template of the page in the simplest possible way for them.
that it does not work well with namespaced tags
One of the problems with any WYSIWYG editors is how to select things that don't have a visual representation. Because if you add a visual representation to them, it's not WYSIWIG anymore, if you keep them hidden, it's easy to screw them (either write inline or to remove them) without noticing.
and that it does seem to work ok with custom attributes.
attributes don't have a visual representation themselves, but they are always glued to the markup, so they move with them. DW is smart enough to allow namespaced attributes and work on the elements without disturbing those attributes.
Basically, they are like attached labels that you move on with your code.
The designers love this, because all they have to understand to start working on this is "don't touch the attributes which name starts with xxx:"
Let on, they will understand, by try/fail, what these attribute means and pretty soon they master the whole template language, allowing the programmers to work away from their templates.
Not having ever used it, I do not know why visual designers like it, why it does not like namespaced tags, etc. Could somebody knowledgeable on the topic expand on the description?
DW is as smart with namespaced elements as it is with namespaced attributes, the problem is that the workflow of a web designer is a continous try/fail of new things and moving things around.
In the process of cut/paste/delete, if done on the WYSIWYG canvas, it's almost impossible to guarantee that those invisible namespaced elements will remain there after you have moved them around.
Attributes carry their own problems (as Daniel explained very well in the other email) but way safer.
-- Stefano.
