Hi, I'm wondering what others feel about the design or architecture of sites so that it is easy to apply new CSS to components. What I mean is having basic frameworks where it is easy to modify and reuse basic designs like one, two and three column designs with various box models, and headers and footers. So that the whole structure of the HTML and CSS are very well structured.
This problem seems to come up when using various CMSs, and the work involved in readapting the default styles to suit the client. To me, something like Plone's default, takes a lot of work to restyle so that it doesn't look like a Plone design anymore. Sometimes you have to dig deep and find stuff hidden away, that shouldn't be so hidden, and should be up front and easy to restyle. Yet a lot of work has gone into making Plone standards compliant. It seems to me that the structure of the design should be very easy to understand and change, but this is often not the case. I could be wrong, but I feel this is what is needed in these products, for there to be an easily understandable CSS that has a well designed framework that is very easy to modify sites. This seems to be to be a weakness in the design of these OSS products. It's not that they are badly designed, it's just that when I look at the CSS the design framework does not jump out at me as obvious. Probably I don't know CSS well enough. Do others think about CSS, design and layouts from the point of view of flexible, extensible frameworks? I'm sure a lot of us try and design our own sites like that so that we can reuse our own components. Regards Geoff ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
