On 1/24/2012 2:11 PM, Erwan de FERRIERES wrote:
2012/1/19 Adrian Crum<[email protected]>:
I would like to implement two new screen widgets:<column-container> and
<column>. The goal is to simplify multi-column layout. The
<column-container> widget can have only<column> child elements and the
<column> widget can have any screen widget child widgets. A width attribute
can specify the width of the columns.
In HTML, the column container is a combination of<table> and<tr>
elements, and the columns are<td> elements. This will be different from the
current floated<div> elements - mainly because getting the floating<div>
layout to work correctly with pluggable widgets across visual themes has
been unsuccessful.
What do you think?
-Adrian
Adrian,
this looks interesting. Also, do you think that using a CSS framework
like bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) could help us
using divs ?
I don't know about bootstrap.
The main problem with using divs is in the back office applications -
where a developer should be able to construct a screen using a toolbox
of screen widgets. It is very convenient to code up screens by dropping
various widgets into the screen at various locations, and let the
rendering engine do the markup for you. The problem is, certain
combinations of widgets will conflict with each other. So visual theme
developers try to accommodate that with comprehensive style sheets. But
the visual theme developer can not anticipate every possible combination
of widgets, so the layout breaks when widgets are combined in a way the
theme developer did not anticipate.
I have spent hours creating style sheets that do layout fixups for
certain screens. I don't want to continue doing that.
The divs, floats, and float clearing work fine for everything preceding
the main content. Floating columns in the main content area seems to be
the crux of the problems I encounter, so I am trying to come up with a
simple and reliable solution.
-Adrian
