Manuel Mall wrote:
Gentlemen,
can we agree on the following?
1. The compliance page must be able to handle multiple FOP versions.
What I was saying was this is true for the special case of having two
very different FOP versions, but once 0.20.5 is gone, this will no
longer be true. So please don't put too much emphasis on designing the
page so its easy to add/remove versions.
2. Which versions are shown at any point in time and how they are called
will be decided on a case by case basis. Currently we are talking only
about the last official release (0.20.5) and the current work in
progress (1.0dev, 0.9pr, ...) but down the track versions may be added
or removed at a frequency we don't know yet.
I think its safe to assume that only 1 version will be shown in the future.
From my perspective, as I have put my hand up to do this, this raises
two issues.
a) What is the appropriate visual design for the compliance page to
achieve 1.?
Two proposals have been made:
i) Maintain the current 3 column layout of
<Version>
Basic | Extended | Complete
and replicate
<Version 1> <Version 2>
Basic | Extended | Complete | Basic | Extended | Complete
This solution allows to quickly see by scanning down a column if a
particular version is conformant at a particular level. However, it
doesn't scale very well. Even with two versions only it will be very
"squished" on the screen. Adding more than 2 will most likely be
looking fairly awkward.
That depends on the user screen size. It might look squished on 800x600,
but I think most folks use 1024x768 as a minimum now.
ii) Change the layout to a single column per version and indicate in a
single separate column at which conformance level a particular FO
object or property "lives" (For a sample see the XSL-FO Object Support
Table at http://www.arcus.com.au/fop/compliance.html). This solution
scales better as it is more compact but it is harder to see if a
particular version is conformant at a particular level.
b) What is the appropriate technical solution to achieve 2.?
i) Manually edit the HTML
ii) Use some WYSIWYG tool which can produce Forrest compliant output
(OpenOffice was suggested)
iii) Revive the generation of the page from XML input (does someone have
the original compliance.xml file - I can't find it in SVN?)
I am happy to investigate and implement (if needed) the technical
solution but I would like to get FOP committer feedback on the look &
feel of the page as this is part of the projects public face.
Its also worth considering the color coding approach suggestion by
Victor Mote. This used to be in place, but some users complained that
they found it difficult to follow. I personally have no problems with it
and it will make the display less cluttered.
Chris
