On Jan 18, 2007, at 10:07 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I got my CSS books yesterday and I stayed up all night reading them. *yawn* *blink blink*I ended up getting CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, and Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. Both books received a lot of good reviews from readers and they turned out to be excellent choices. After reading them, I concluded that we were pretty much on the right track with the CSS coding guideline suggestions made so far. There were a couple of concepts introduced in the books that I would like to add to the list.Now that I feel adequately educated, I'm ready to help move the CSS effort along. For starters, I really, REALLY need a committer to look at Jira issue OFBIZ-605 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ OFBIZ-605) and get it committed. Mailing list members who objected to the idea of a single stylesheet will have their "day in court" again in the future. I'd like to see another discussion of splitting the styles up once the consolidated style sheet is refined and complete.
I just took a peak at this again and it's looks fine, so it is now in SVN.
I'd love to commit to helping out, and I think it's great that you're asking for this support from someone. Unfortunately I just can't do it right now... my low billable hours are starting to get noticed by my partners... ;) I'll certainly keep an eye on this and help out where I can. If things calm down for us a bit at Hotwax I and other will definitely get involved, we've been talking about doing something with this for a couple of months now, and Tim Ruppert is especially enthusiastic about getting this done.
As a reasonable expectation: let's see what we can do to establish a direction starting right away, and then see how far we get, and then at the developers conference try to knock out some good stuff. There are already some really talented front-end people with good HTML and CSS experience that have "registered" for the conference.
At the dev conference we'd like to have one "champion" for each objective. Would you be interested in playing that role for this? The stuff you're describing below is actually a pretty good description of what a champion would do for this sort of thing (according to my imagination... ;) ).
Chris Howe put the "drastically changed" maincss.css file into a new Jira issue (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-633). That Jira issue is being used as a type of sandbox to try out CSS ideas. Once the techniques in that issue are proven project-worthy, we can then go back to the existing code and make incremental changes to OFBiz to get those techniques implemented in the main project. To restate: OFBIZ-633 is experimental - it is NOT intended to be included in the project as-is.I noticed there has been some activity along these lines in Jira. Some of it is pretty old. The CSS effort as a whole seems to be floundering because of lack of direction or cohesion. There are plenty of contributors taking a stab at this, but some of the work is incomplete or incorrectly implemented. So, I'd like to volunteer as a coordinator. I can set up an umbrella Jira issue that links to the existing and future sub-tasks. I'd like to set up a web page of CSS coding guidelines (that we've all agreed on) so that the contributors are all working toward the same goal.Speaking of CSS coding guidelines, Transcending CSS recommends keeping layout details out of CSS class names and IDs. I like that idea. Class names/IDs like "TopLeftColumn" or "BottomRightTabbar" imply layout. Names/IDs should describe the content they style - not where they will be placed.So, if there are no objections, I'd like to start down this path:1. Put a CSS coding guidelines RFC on the dev mailing list. Wait a few days for comments. 2. Put the agreed-upon guidelines on a web page (umbrella Jira issue or Wiki page). 3. Create the umbrella CSS effort Jira issue. Link to existing CSS issues as sub-tasks. Create new sub tasks.4. Monitor progress, keep things moving in the right direction.5. Coordinate with committers to get tested code back into the project.I'm committed to seeing this through until it is done. Let me know what you think.
A CSS/HTML best practices document would be a great resource and I agree this would help a lot. This approach to create it sounds good. If you could throw out a draft to this mailing list I'm guessing various people will review and respond. It might be good to actually start with a page on the docs.ofbiz.org wiki space (OFBIZ space), and then people can feedback there and we'll have a revision history and such. Once that settles down and we want to "canonize" it, I or someone else with permissions there can move the page to the "OFBADMIN" space where all of the other best practices and such documents live.
-David
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