On 12/28/2010 04:13 PM, Anca Luca wrote: > Hi guys, > > Short story: > > Where to put the css which is needed by java macros (e.g. the columns > layouting of the container macro) > > 1/ in colibri.css > 2/ in a .css included on demand by the macro > a) from platform resources (using ssfx) > b) from the jar (using ssrx) > c) from an object in a page with ssx > 3/ refactor the skin concept and create a 'platform css' to store all > these and not be affected by skin customization. > > Long story: > > I can see I've caused the web standards tests to fail for the trunk > (http://hudson.xwiki.org/job/xwiki-product-enterprise-tests/org.xwiki.enterprise$xwiki-enterprise-test-webstandards/252/testReport/) > because of the inline style attributes used by the columns layout of the > container, whijch is now used on the main page. > > Now, I would like us to agree about where to store the styles needed by > the java macros to work right, such as the container macro with columns > layout. The options I see are: > > 1/ as until today (e.g. box macro, warning, error, info, etc), in > colibri.css/toucan.css/otherskinwehave.css. I don't like this solution > too much because it means that when another skin is used, things won't > work anymore unless the person writing the new skin takes care of > copying all these "things that must be there". The advantage of this is > having a single .css file to load on page load, the disadvantage being > that their css is loaded on all pages, regardless of it being used or not. > > 2/ loading of the styles on demand, each macro loads its style when it > needs it > a) from a .css file located in the platform resources, which the macro > has to include using the ssfx plugin when is executed -- much like a > wiki macro would to with a ssx. > b) from a .css file located in the macro archive (using ssrx), which the > macro includes when executed. > c) from a ssx page > > c) has the advantage of being very very much more easy to change than a) > and finally than b) which is the hardest to customize. But on the other > side c) means the java macro depends on a page, which is not that good. > Note that "cascading" customization is possible for all these choices > (adding an extra css with rules to overwrite the rules in the default > css for the macro) and that in my view, it's enough, since the idea is > that the layout should be preserved no matter what (e.g. a user might > want to add a red border to the columns, but not make the columns > display as two paragraphs instead of two columns). > > 3/ refactoring the whole skin thing and creating a "platform" css, which > contains things that should work regardless of the skin used. Pros: it's > an adaptation of the current approach (1/), that solves the problem. > Cons: takes longer, might be very hard to separate what's platform and > what's skin. > > These being said, I think I prefer 2/ if 3/ is not realistic, and for > the container macro at least, I would prefer to implement 2b).
Strong +1 for 2b over the other options. colibri.css should not contain component style, just general layout. I don't think that the overriding disadvantage of 2b holds, since users are not supposed to _change_ platform styles at all, be they in wiki documents as SSX objects or as "hidden" .css files inside jars. Changing platform skin that way makes it much harder to upgrade to a newer version. CSS overrides in a custom skin or a custom SSX is the proper way to do that. The other disadvantage, about HTTP request proliferation, I've always said it and I repeat it once more, this is how XWiki works in _development_ mode. For production static website intended for massive workload, all the static resources need to be optimized: combine CSS and JS in one big file, combine images into sprites, move static resources to a CDN... Maybe we should write this down in the administration guide, and maybe offer some tools that can help with that (like a tool which gathers all skin files from the jars, the skins and the SSX objects, concatenates them, feeds sends them through YUI minifier, then outputs a zip with the resulting 1 JS and 1 CSS file to put in the CDN). -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/ _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
