Hi Jonathan (et al.), Thanks for your post.
On 15/05/2007, at 1:17 PM, Jonathan Locke wrote: > i don't understand how you can have a component-oriented web > framework that generates markup and css without having layout > managers. browsers are not consistent enough in the way they > render to just position everything absolutely. even if they were > consistent, you still couldn't use fixed layouts because fonts vary > from platform to platform. what you're asking for doesn't make > any sense to me because "programmatically specifying the place > of all widgets and content", is /exactly what a layout manager does/. Thank you again, you may have pointed out problems with my approach (which, of course, are better to find out earlier rather than later). That said, I don't see why programmatically specifying the place of all widgets and content can't be done in a browser- independent way (compensating for browser differences, even perhaps adjusting font sizes, I don't know) without using a layout manager. To me, a layout manager is something that adapts the layout according to some generalised rules (e.g. a row or column layout manager) to fit the current display area size, and are specifically made to handle resizing of that display area. I am not that interested in resizing, but a static structure derived from the content, styles, and layout data. I guess an example would be a page layout program. I think in pretty much any Web framework, I could have a single custom component on a page, and use the application to generate all the HTML to go into that component and build most (if not all) of the page. I guess I am looking for a framework that would help me generate that HTML programmatically. As I mentioned, I used to do this in PERL, I was looking for something in Java and higher-level. That's just reminded me of the Apache Element Construction Set (ECS) at <http://jakarta.apache.org/ecs/>. It does something like I think I want in Java but hasn't been updated for a number of years (since 2003) so it lacks the latest HTML constructs (e.g. CSS). > my personal opinion (and one of the driving forces behind wicket) > is that designers should not code and coders should not design. Sure, that's great for most Web applications. I would hope you could understand though that, perhaps, there were a class of Web applications for which this wasn't the optimal approach. Further, I wasn't suggesting the designers code, but that code was used to generate the whole page (i.e. no template). This doesn't preclude designers from designing the page in another way (e.g. in another part of the application). > in any case, i am not aware of other solutions to this problem > outside those already mentioned. No problem, I'm thinking that the AJAX Web frameworks like Echo2 or wingS (or one of the others, frameworks like these seem to be popping up everywhere these days) may be the way to go, with a custom component (that I write) that does the rendering for the content I want to render, in the way I want to render it (i.e. data driven). I just need to find which one allows me to do that most easily. Cheers, Ashley. -- Ashley Aitken Perth, Western Australia mrhatken at mac dot com Skype Name: MrHatken (GMT + 8 Hours!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Wicket-user mailing list Wicket-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wicket-user
