For list and multi type forms I agree that we'll probably never move away from
a table based layout, they are tabular in nature after all.
For single forms I did some POC work on this and it can be seen in the
newcustomer.ftl file in ecommerce. The main classes used there called form-row,
form-label, and form-field. This seems to work fairly well actually.
-David
Leon Torres wrote:
Hi Al,
I created some pure-css forms with no tables involved for the CRMSFA
application (writeEmail.ftl and viewEmail.ftl). My experience with that
is CSS as currently implemented isn't suitable for doing this kind of
thing. Column layouts are still a pain, so css can't be considered a
replacement for tables quite yet (see the Slashdot interview with Hakon
today). You need absolute positioning for it to work, and floats are
just a pita to get right.
But we're thinking about restructuring the DOM of the form html renderer
to give Ajax and CSS people something easier to work with. This is
probably as simple as giving each table a unique id = form name. Then
you can use CSS selectors to make your form richer.
- Leon
Al Byers wrote:
I know there has been discussion about this in the past, but I can't
see a clear answer to my questions from them. I see a need for a
simple ability to create single forms with css styles only. My current
need is to show a horizontal query bar with drop-downs that send a
query to the server. In this case I do not want any titles to show. I
looked at using the position attribute to do this, but the table
format screws things up. I also want to be able to take advantage of
other widget special features, such as lookup or dates, without having
tables involved.
I was just thinking of creating a new form type, "css", that cycles
thru the fields and does not do anything with tables and ignores the
title if it is empty.
Is this too simplistic? A bad idea? Won't be difficult to put together.
-Al
