[Solar-talk] A CSS Framework for Solar (was: Pre-release notes)

[Rodrigo Moraes]

On 7/29/06, Clay Loveless wrote:
> On Jul 29, 2006, at 12:04 PM, Rodrigo Moraes wrote:
> The biggest problem with any CSS standardization, of course, is
> getting too comfortable with the chosen library.

Indeed. This happens all the time - until you get comfortable, you
have to learn and don't see many benefits.

> Many times I find
> myself working on projects that have been marked up for XHTML/CSS by
> someone else, and need to adapt those marked-up pages to functional
> back-end code quickly. As such, there's rarely time to re-work the
> markup to use a standard CSS library.

There's nothing much to do if you can't change the markup or don't
have time to. If you are working with someone else's markup and CSS,
which happens pretty often, then you perhaps won't be able to use the
available helpers/widgets or will have to adapt them to fit that code.

(This could be easier if we think in a way to make our widgets as
adaptable to someone else's markup as possible. I have been trying to
do something in this direction with the pager helpers set; I believe
this would be possible using adapters and decorators for our widgets.
Then you would write a decorator to output a widget using a different
markup, instead of duplicating and adapting its entire logic, or
perhaps would extend the default adapter to make its logic slightly
different.)

The biggest benefits from a standard widgets library would happen if
you start a Solar project from scratch. Then you would have a library
of commonly used widgets highly customizable using CSS to start with.
When we create a gallery with customized CSS for Solar forms, tabs,
menus... even non-designers would start making beautiful Solar apps
from beginning, which could attract more users and code. From a
"marketing" point of view, Solar would be more attractive to newcomers
if it could provide some appealing apps to start working with, I mean,
with a web 2.0 look etc.

> ... finally, I vote this way because I'm halfway through writing
> Prototype and Scriptaculous helpers for Solar. :) Should be finishing
> up today/tomorrow, and will post for all to review. This last item
> doesn't count for as much as the other four reasons ... but carries
> some weight for me, at least. :)

I don't like the sound of "other frameworks have adopted it so we
should to", but you may be right about people migrating from other
frameworks. And you've made your best point with this last item.
Awesome, looking forward to seeing it! :-)

Hey, I won't die if we go for "Protaculous"; I like Prototype a lot,
and you are right about YUI's verbosity. Prototype is very much
concise and powerful. We just have to choose one... and go.

cheers,
rodrigo moraes / brazil