[Zope-CMF] Pure CSS for main template

[Charlie Clark]

Am 06.10.2008 um 02:00 schrieb Jens Vagelpohl:

> Please make sure you stick to one functionality/change per branch to
> make it easier for others to make a diff and understand all the
> changes. I thought you wanted to use the branch for the
> folder_contents work only ;-)

oops, sorry! It's just I'd been planning to work on this for about a  
year and yesterday was a good time to start. Should I create a  
separate branch just for this?

>> The idea is not to do
>> a redesign but to implement the existing one using CSS now that  
>> pretty
>> much all of the browsers in use have at least adequate support.
>> Customers will hopefully still want to have a different design but it
>> should be easier to do.
>
> CMFDefault represents a simple sample application for the CMF. It
> doesn't have to be pretty by itself, but any changes should have these
> goals:
>
>  - make it easier for people to customize the look-and-feel using CSS
> only, or...
>
>  - make it easier to take the current main_template as a guideline
> for a new main_template by making it as simple and understandable as
> possible.

I hope to achieve both of those.

>> I'm using an "em" based elastic approach where the layout will "grow"
>> with the chosen text size. I know that most browsers have now caught
>> up with Opera and offer proper zooming but there are still lots of  
>> IE6
>> installs out there. I'm working on a baseline of 1024 x 768. Does
>> anyone have objections to this?
>
> I'd be opposed to any template that uses fixed widths and which does
> not degrade gracefully with less or more width.


hm, the current layout is fixed-width. The new one is not per se fixed- 
width is driven by the size of the font that a user has. The argument  
about growing and shrinking gracefully is important but it is also  
important to maintain usability and particularly readability: having a  
site expand to fit 100% can mean either extremely long lines or ugly  
gaps between columns or conversely columns with line-breaks every  
word. The following article covers the main issues concisely: http://www.htmldog.com/articles/elasticdesign/

What I am to do is to maintain the current design but make it much  
easier to adapt through CSS, ie. swap between font-size based and  
percentages. So good documentation of how the layout works is essential.

Charlie
--
Charlie Clark
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