Hi,
I going to snip alot because I wholeheartedly agree with most everything you wrote.
-----Original Message----- From: Pier Fumagalli [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 3:03 PM
<snip/>
Again, my graphic team knows only HTML, they don't want to think about how the data is organized in the back, they could care less (as I could care less about their CSSes).
This is where I think developers make a big mistake (caring less about CSS). As demonstrated by Stefano with his thumbnail XSLT, lack of thinking about the larger picture in the 'design-space' makes things much more difficult. I would bet that many cocooners could get rid of a great deal of their XSLT line-count/complexity if they truly understood how XSLT co-exists with CSS.
You're right that designers won't be able to do it. That is why you have to do it. They give you a Photoshop mockup and you take it from there.
I gotta be kidding. All the graphic designers I know work from photoshop to super-cross-platform HTML. And there is no way you can stick your nose into that process.
Many of them are already usign CSS as much as they can, but the problem is that CSS is not as cross-browser as we all would like it to be. For example, not even gecko is able to render the <div style="display: inline"> properly. Not even talking about KHTML or IE5.2 for mac.
The workflow is that they generate the graphics and somebody else "mounts" it using XSLT.
This, in real life, doesn't work because no graphic designers wants to deal with xslt and no programmer either, because they think it's a boring job.
the figure of the 'xslt'-ist is a rare one. Mostly people that would be programmers if only they knew how and had time to experiment more.
This is the problem with transformation-based templating.
So, IMO, it is useful to have both, so that you can adjust the technology to map the skills in your workteam and not viceversa.
Stefano.
