Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: .LRN Gardens

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40: Re: .LRN Gardens (response to 1)
Posted by Torben Brosten on
The House of Style[1] seems to be working to similar goals, and has incorporated much of the knowledge into software. I haven't had a chance to try the software, but it looks very promising.

Continuing some discussion from above:

I stay away from the # id tags. They are stipulated to only be used once per page, which is exactly the opposite of what is trying to be done here. When presenting a consistent looking page, re-use the same styles. Use the class attribute to avoid  the 1 use per display constraint.

I haven't had a chance to see how css is being handled for 5.1 yet, and probably should wait before presenting this thought. That said, here it is:

First, the zoned breakdown of css files above seems appropriate, especially if a parameter exists at the subsite and package level to specify a custom css file. Helps reduce the work in updating an openacs/dotlrn website.

Use the adp templating for specifying css where possible.

Sometimes, the templating system doesn't work, because the output has been created before reaching the template. For example, in the ecommerce package, images are returned pre-wrapped with links, and sometimes prices and other output is returned in blocks of html making it difficult to customize or adapt to css without creating new procs.

Maybe ad_div and ad_span procs can be created to easily, consistently wrap smaller bits of output when it is too confining to have the style determined by the adp template. (I think) most output is known to either be inline or block style at the tcl level.

Or, how about this: [ad_css $output $div_or_span_or_other_tag $class_name_or_attributes]. In the tcl, a check could see if the variables are defined in the template, and if not, use some defaults provided there.

For example, [ad_css $output $type $classname]  where the div or span tag is not carried through to output when $classname is empty/null.

Of course, this would only be when templating functionality is not directly available to strategically modify proc output.

1. http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/browser_support/