Adrian,
I think they are all good ideas.
Jacopo
Adrian Crum wrote:
The recent UI refactoring has done a lot to make the UI more flexible.
But, there are a couple of areas that still need some discussion and
possible changes.
1. The new tab-bar style breaks when there is a response message. The
Party Manager profile page is an example. The tab bar at the top of the
content
area breaks when an action causes one of those "The following
happened..." messages to appear. The response messages need to be moved
outside the main
content area.
2. The app-navigation HTML compound is contained by the "centerarea"
<div> element. It would be nice to be able to move the app-navigation
separately from the centerarea. The app-navigation div needs to be moved
outside the centerarea.
3. There are a number of unnecessary <div> elements inserted by the
Global Decorator - which results in unnecessary markup. Some of those
divs are used for multi-column layouts. It would be preferable to have
the multi-column divs inserted by component decorators when they are
needed.
So, with those things considered, here is the general layout I propose
(before and after) -
Before (current layout):
<body>
<div id="masthead">
...
</div>
<div id="main-navigation">
...
</div>
<div class="centerarea">
<div id="app-navigation">
...
</div>
<div class="contentarea">
<div id="column-container">
<div id="content-main-section">
<div id="content-messages">
"The following ocurred..."
</div>
... (menu bars, screenlets, etc)
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="footer">
...
</div>
</body>
After (proposed layout):
<body>
<div id="masthead">
...
</div>
<div id="main-navigation">
...
</div>
<div id="app-navigation">
...
</div>
<div id="content-messages">
"The following ocurred..."
</div>
<div class="contentarea">
... (menu bars, screenlets, etc)
</div>
<div id="footer">
...
</div>
</body>
The proposed layout would eliminate unnecessary HTML element nesting -
making style changes easier. Also, the proposed layout would still have
the same appearance, but use less markup. The only appearance change
would be when a response message appears - it would be in its own
container instead of being in the main content area. This will keep the
main content unaltered when response messages appear.
Comments are welcome.
-Adrian
