On 04/02/2009, at 2:51 PM, Mike Bailey wrote: > Consider me low hanging fruit for a design makeover. > > Unstyled forms look crap. For years tools like Dreamweaver have > included CSS to make them look nicer. Where can I find some nice form > CSS? GUI programmers get a set look from their toolkits. I want some > to choose from for my web apps.
That's a long-term goal of Formtastic, although I'm no-where near that on the CSS front. * Step one is consistent, flexible markup that can be hooked up and styled to suit. (Done(-ish)) * Step two is a set of re-usable stylesheets, Javascripts and other stuff on top that can be used to decorate the markup in common ways "out of the box". (No where near done) So you use a DSL to build the form in the view (all HTML is abstracted away, you just trust it's "good"), you include a stylesheet, and ThingsJustLookAwesome. You add a few classes and options to switch the layout around, and if it's something really different you need, you add a few lines of CSS or JS over the top to bend it all into shape. This takes care of a few parts of the design problem: * solid, well-tested UI patterns used (common widgets to do common things in familiar ways) * sold visuals (nothing ugly, nothing broken, good balance, etc) Designing a good interaction experience (the flow of using the thing, good labels, good information, good text) is of course a whole other ball game, which I'm also happy to rant about constantly ;) --- Justin French justin.fre...@indent.com.au http://justinfrench.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to rails-oceania@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rails-oceania+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
