Alessandro, nice to hear that. Just some comments on the necessity to comply with W3C standards:
First of all, I would like to stress that a web mapping application is no way comparable with standard web content. It is an application, not just structured content. Buttons, etc do not contain any content, they are are tools to use the application. I don't see why putting everything in DIV's instead of table cells will make the use of the application easier. Many of the requirements of WCAG etc. deal with handicapped people, mainly partially sighted or blind people. I do not want to be cruel, but I don't see how a mapping application could be really used by them. The main information is inside the map *images*, and the user interface is mainly intended to produce these images. p.mapper uses frames in version 1, and I agree this is not compatible with newer W3C standards. So in any case, just consider to use p.mapper 2. Since the problem with the map image refresh turned out to be a generic Mapserver/Mapscript bug and not related to pmapper, I can recomment pmapper 2 without any hesitations. It uses mainly DIV's, but typically with absolute positioning. It makes also no sense to make the layout independent of the styles, since the correct positioning of tools, map, legend, etc is indispensable for the usage and acceptable look of the application. I don't know if the possibility to use the application without scripting is required by the standards you have to deal with. But I would say, no way to avoid Javascript, just purely simple applications can do that. If you want you can try to play with floating and relative positioning. I gave up after painful experiments with DOM, CSS and so forth, and browser-dependent display modes. I would already be happy to have the whole re-sizing and re-positioning of the layout components be slightly more flexible. I already mentioned this as a very welcome contribution, but so far nobody wanted to tackle this. So it remained like it is and I can live with it. For a modified layout one has to mainly adapt the resizeDiv() function and the 'map.phtml'. Can you list more in detail where you think you need to modify what, which tags, which structures, in order to comply with standards required? Main modifications in planned or partially addressed features are more related to query functionality. So they should not be touched very much by modifications of the user interface itself. You will probably mainly have to deal with map.phtml and pmapper.js. The latest dev version from 7th March is the one to use. Since then I mainly started to modify query.php, squery.php for pm 1, they will be included later in pmapper 2. If you have further detailed questions feel free to ask me, either via the list or off-list. Armin Alessandro Radaelli wrote: > > First of all I would like to congratulate Armin; pmapper is a very > powerful and easy to use web mapping solution, and after some tests we > are going to adopt it as our new web mapping solution for intranet and > internet applications. According our web-policy (and being a government > offices according an italian law, too) we are bound to have only w3c > validated and accessible pages (with both html and css validation > passed, and possibly with WCAG specifications). > We are starting to work on pmapper code in this way and we would like to > contribute our work to the community: we would like to know the better > way to coordinate our effort with Armin (if interested....) > > Main areas of modification will be tag cleanup, use of div instead table > for buttons and possibly a "float" based layout of map.phtlm. We hope > (but I'm not sure in this moment) to end in 3-4 weeks. > > Which version have we to use as a starting > point? pmapper2_2006-03-07.zip ? Or you have a newer one? I think that > modifications will be spread in all code files, so it is very important > to find the right way to collaborate. > > Best regards > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Pmapper-users mailing list > Pmapper-users at faunalia.it > http://faunalia.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pmapper-users
