Hi Christophe,
On 5 March 2010 15:50, Christophe Dupriez <[email protected]> wrote:
> One book hopefully just stroked me on this topic:
"Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design" by Andy Clarke
> http://transcendingcss.com/
>
> The main idea demonstrated is the same than the intent of the XSLT layer:
> Java code should provide a (user level) conceptual view of data that
> XSLT should transform into presentation.
> Just replace the word XSLT by CSS !!! Then:
> * The user browser is working more to apply CSS on received XHTML data
> * The DSpace server is working a lot less (no XSLT stylesheet to interpret)
> * People with vision disabilities receives nicely semantically
> structured data and are not bewildered with data structured for
> presentation.
>
My opinion is that the benefit of XMLUI for much of the community is in the
CSS / XHTML layer. I'll go further and say that there should be even less
reason for anyone to be changing anything other than CSS than there is now
in either user interface (this is along the lines of Rob's presentation at
DSUG - we mostly have common problems, and should have common solutions).
That's largely a separate argument to how you get to an XHTML data model
though, even though I do favour a simpler and less resource intensive route
to achieve that.
> The corollary of this is that project development then follows these steps:
>
> 1) Interaction design: what is the succession of steps a user may be
> requested to do for a given task?
>
> 2) Generation design: what is the data tagged with "user level" concepts
> (using XHTML and microformats) that must be sent to the user browser?
> Does the DSpace Java generation layer for XML-UI could be used as
> a basis of such semantically tagged xHTML
> (removing XSLT processing from the server) ?
>
> 3) Presentation design: how this data is presented on the Web page: CSS
> only is enough!
> CSS can even change the **ordering** of data blocks on the page.
>
Well made points - the 'Java generation layer' is a bigger and separate
discussion (for these purposes).
* all programming is in one language: Java (JSP eases the upper level of
> generation)
> Simplicity, performance, scalability...
>
This is where I would urge you to take a look at the work I started in the
'webmvc' module:
http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/modules/webmvc/
It's not as far developed as I would like it to be before discussing it, but
as we are touching on this area, we might as well.
Much of the project revolves around using Spring WebMVC to provide the split
between code and template/view that is not completely captured in the
existing JSPUI.
But also, it's using Freemarker to provide that means of translating a Java
object model into XHTML. The benefit of using Freemarker is that you can't
have code embedded into templates the same way that you can in JSP (some
conditional statements are provided), and you have more freedom in loading
templates from anywhere (making it possible to provide a way to
edit/replace/override those templates without redeploying the application).
What's more, Freemarker (unlike Velocity) allows you to use JSP tag
libraries - so if you are coming from a JSP environment, you can still make
use of tag libraries if necessary, without replacing them.
I see it as a really good trade-off between ease of use, familiarity, and
flexibility. Yes, there are some things that you can do in XMLUI with the
aspect / pipeline approach that would be easier to migrate between version
upgrades (it may be more likely that you have to merge changes to a template
on a Freemarker project than if using XMLUI), but you have to balance that
against the immediacy and resource requirements of the simpler approach.
> G
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