Hi Michael,
hey ben
thanks for your response!
The real killer is the code produced by the inline WYSIWYG editors - some of them produce pretty butchered mark-up. I'm yet to see a cross-browser WYSIWYG editor that produces valid code, but there are a few in the works.
we have epozng (http://epoz.sourceforge.net/) which is going to be renamed to "kupu" soon ;) it has nice xhtml output even in ie. maybe something that the people that are working on such editors should have a look on. they're moving away from "zope only" implementations anyway ;)
A feature of some CMS' - such as FarCry - WYSIWYG editors are treated as plug-ins, letting you can choose an editor that covers your requirements. When a better WYSIWYG editor comes on the market, you can simply plug it in and turn it on.
same for plone ;) we already have some which are quite usable even if they're not 1.0 or 0.5 yet ;) - for example the old epoz (http://www.zfl.uni-bielefeld.de/personal/mjablonski/epoz), kupu (see above), cmfvisualeeditor (http://sourceforge.net/projects/collective), and an implementation of fckeditor (http://www.fredck.com/FCKeditor/ - it's not downloadable yet)
Who are these people? Somebody has to invest their time learning these skills - the effort has to come from somewhere.
which effort? learning css of newbies or putting together such a skin?
first one: http://plone.org/development/teams/ui/css_powered_sites (thats what i got in the last week - more in the works - we're just getting 2.0 out ;)) - why do they learn css? because it solves basic problems they had with ealier plone versions, and they would have them again - customized templates of earlier versions are able to crash your current one. and thats not only a plone issue (see things i'm mentioning later)
second one: http://plone.org/development/teams/ui/ - to solve the problems from above. and we keep on coming with new concepts that ease development and migration between versions, because we agree on "there is no 'perfect structure' that fits on every site". we just don't believe in the fact that writing skins from scratch for new projects is something good ;)
I disagree with the "shouldn't need to think", but agree with "it should be there." I think it's always important to keep accessibility/usability in mind, no matter how small the site is.
sure but what if someone already thought about that for you? ;) thats what i mean. we have people that do usability tests and we have people from the w3c wcag working group. so i guess we're pretty good :)
A skin is nothing more than mark-up coupled with CSS and images. It's really quite simple to create your own look and feel using products like FarCry.
i didn't use/try farcry but many cmses out there mix parts of logic or variables with templates - sometimes you have to. that causes problems like the one i've mentioned above - so migration is needed. how do you migrate customized markup with logic/outdated variables in it? ;) let's face it, it's almost impossible when it comes to semi complicated stuff.
A CMS should be about making it easier to build and maintain web sites. Results are directly proportional to time, effort and/or cost.
thats what i'm talking about ;) thats why my argument is: having a "usable, accessible, semantically (almost - we're working things out ;)) correct, very skinable with css"-cms is faster and easier to maintain than your own skin with markup and css, that you have to constantly update to improve usability accessiblity etc etc etc. with a flexible skin these updates of the standard skin, when you update.
also, if you have a "plugin" based cms, the problem is that most of the time the look and feel of a plugin is totally different and you have to modify it to make it fit into your skin. now if you have a standard set of widgets that are easily skinable, you end up writing one skin and every new plugin that you install gets the design of your brand.
to be arrogant (hehe): plones skin isn't just a skin - it's 50% of the application.
in case someone thinks this is some kind of weird promotion: i don't really want to advertize plone here - but it's all i can take as example for the things i do.
regards, michael -- </gro.jiin//:ptth> �jiin ********************************************************* The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *********************************************************
