I am definitely interesting in working on making OpenACS
more design friendly and I think a forum specificly
oriented towards design and user experience would help.
I have been working in that direction but am hampered by
the fact that I am a terrible designer and don't really have
a good handle on what we should do. I think a design forum
where people ask questions and make suggestions would
raise the level of awareness for the developers about
design issues and hopefully we will get to the point where
changing the design of an OpenACS site is not such a
perilous and often mind numbing task.
My view is that we should be ripping out most of
what passes for design in the existing toolkit and
making the whole thing much more CSS friendly. To do so
we would need to first figure out a scheme for class names
and id's, what does and doesn't need to have a class name, and also how to handle per package and per subsite
customization. It's something we probably can't do without
some reasonable tech savvy designers helping and a new forum might be a good way to kick off the effort.
Getting further off topic, beyond removing the per package master templates I have also
been trying to make the html we generate xhtml compliant
and cleaning things up generally. You can see an example
of style sheet switching on my blog page, which is also proof of my claim that I am a terrible designer :)
