I got my CSS books yesterday and I stayed up all night reading them. *yawn*
*blink blink*
I ended up getting CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, and Transcending CSS by Andy
Clarke. Both books received a lot of good reviews from readers and they turned
out to be excellent choices. After reading them, I concluded that we were pretty
much on the right track with the CSS coding guideline suggestions made so far.
There were a couple of concepts introduced in the books that I would like to add
to the list.
Now that I feel adequately educated, I'm ready to help move the CSS effort
along. For starters, I really, REALLY need a committer to look at Jira issue
OFBIZ-605 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-605) and get it
committed. Mailing list members who objected to the idea of a single stylesheet
will have their "day in court" again in the future. I'd like to see another
discussion of splitting the styles up once the consolidated style sheet is
refined and complete.
Chris Howe put the "drastically changed" maincss.css file into a new Jira issue
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-633). That Jira issue is being used
as a type of sandbox to try out CSS ideas. Once the techniques in that issue are
proven project-worthy, we can then go back to the existing code and make
incremental changes to OFBiz to get those techniques implemented in the main
project. To restate: OFBIZ-633 is experimental - it is NOT intended to be
included in the project as-is.
I noticed there has been some activity along these lines in Jira. Some of it is
pretty old. The CSS effort as a whole seems to be floundering because of lack of
direction or cohesion. There are plenty of contributors taking a stab at this,
but some of the work is incomplete or incorrectly implemented. So, I'd like to
volunteer as a coordinator. I can set up an umbrella Jira issue that links to
the existing and future sub-tasks. I'd like to set up a web page of CSS coding
guidelines (that we've all agreed on) so that the contributors are all working
toward the same goal.
Speaking of CSS coding guidelines, Transcending CSS recommends keeping layout
details out of CSS class names and IDs. I like that idea. Class names/IDs like
"TopLeftColumn" or "BottomRightTabbar" imply layout. Names/IDs should describe
the content they style - not where they will be placed.
So, if there are no objections, I'd like to start down this path:
1. Put a CSS coding guidelines RFC on the dev mailing list. Wait a few days for
comments.
2. Put the agreed-upon guidelines on a web page (umbrella Jira issue or Wiki
page).
3. Create the umbrella CSS effort Jira issue. Link to existing CSS issues as
sub-tasks. Create new sub tasks.
4. Monitor progress, keep things moving in the right direction.
5. Coordinate with committers to get tested code back into the project.
I'm committed to seeing this through until it is done.
Let me know what you think.
-Adrian
