a few things that eased the pain for me:
1. Package up form widgets into custom tags. even just simple textboxes. Or if you are lucky enough to have CF7 the cfform XForms feature is an another way to do it.
2. a hybrid approach is sometimes a way to go. we tried as best we could to get our pages working via CSS layouts, eventually we got stuck on something or other (cant remember what it was, im lucky enough to have interface gurus to handle that stuff for me) ..but basically in the end we just wrapped the whole thing in a table where we had to. having most of the layout running off custom tags made this alot easer to do.
3. Not that we did this much, but check out the 'tiles' notion they talk about in Apache Struts. Ive seen this kind of idea in Mach-ii, fusebox and MG too. build the view up in pieces and then assembling it in one final 'layout' template. I really love this idea, its a really clean way to build templates.... if only i could get it into the of the rest of my teams head that everything doesnt have to have its own template. seems that for design/interface people its hard to let go of the 'web page is a page that lives in 1 file' concept.
As for mach-ii vs MG. Ive just started to play with MG and i found it alot easier to get into that mach-ii. I agree with sean about the whole event queue thing being hard to grasp. For anyone getting into these frameworks i think the steps should be fusebox, mvc fusebox, mg then mach-ii. but that all depends on the kinds of apps u build i spose.
my 2c
Pat
On 1/13/06, Geoff Bowers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Tim Van Der Hulst wrote:
> > CSS based design, once you get over the "hump" of learning it isn't
> > really any more difficult than table based design.
>
> You've missed my point. Building web applications using CSS is really
> slow, yes it's possible but it's not very efficient. Prototyping
> screens becomes a PITA compared to more flexible grid based
> approaches.
We use CSS design as an approach to UI because it is simply easier,
faster and more maintainable than table based design. Accessibility is
just a nice bonus.
> For what its worth I still think some website layouts are quite
> difficult to achieve with pure CSS. Take for example 3 column layout
> with footer positioned at the bottom of the screen. Pretty much have
> to absolutely position the footer using _javascript_ due to the fact
> that divs don't expand out unless absolutely positioned (except IE)
> IIRC. I've seen a few hacks for this and also degradable js table
> injection techniques etc. This could be avoided by using table
> support in CSS3 but browser support for this is poor as you know.
CSS based design is the present best practice for html based UI. The
layout model is different so there are some things that are potentially
more difficult to replicate exactly as you would have done them in
tables. But then there's really no need to replicate exactly what you
were doing in tables anyway, there are plenty of alternatives.
Arguing that table based layouts are faster is like saying .CFM
templates with no custom tags, UDFs or CFCs is a faster way to develop
CF. They're both perfectly acceptable ways to code, but given the choice...
-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/
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