[Seaside] Rails and Seaside

[Jeremy Shute]

I recognize this argument as one I've seen before (from CSS Zen Garden). 
The concept is great, and I concede that the effects are very good. 
Especially in your case, Avi: Dabble is just HOT.

I like chanting the mantra myself.  "Stop using table-based layout.  Treat
HTML more like LaTeX and less like Word!"  I don't think this is mutually
exclusive with templating, though.

The questions I ask myself...  Do I WANT to be bothered when a sequence
should be represented as an ordered vs. unordered list?  Do I WANT to
decorate pages with ids and classes in anticipation?  Do I WANT the
designer constrained to a dependence on me to "make the pretty possible"? 
For this project, I don't care, but for others, I might.

As strange and backward as it sounds, I like the HTML::Template method of
doing things (from Perl).  I don't think it's the sweet-spot in Seaside's
case, because Seaside ends up programmatically generating id's, form
variable names, and other highly dynamic behavior that IS quite dependent
on the number and nature of output tags.  However, the rigors of
HTML::Template ensure that no one "slips" logic into the "presentation"
layer.

Jeremy



> Jeremy,
>
> Here are some classes that I added to generate a static site from
> seaside.  The goal was to generate something a web designer could look
> at and help with the CSS, and I needed to generate a static site that
> could be run on any web server.  I grabbed the code from this mailing
> list from a post by Avi and tweaked it a little bit for my specific
> needs.  I think it was a thread about sending a page as an email
> attachment.  It is just enough to do what I needed to do, but you
> could shape into what you need.
>
> As Avi pointed out, you could have a web designer just edit the css
> for the site.  They could do this all within the browser with the
> halo's turned on and using the source view and css style editor.
>
> - Wilkes
>
> On 1/6/06, Avi Bryant <avi.bryant at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jan 6, 2006, at 11:34 AM, Jeremy Shute wrote:
>>
>> > Yeah, this is a drawback for me, not an advantage.
>> >
>> > I have come to admit that I build great code and ugly sites.  With
>> > Seaside, I'm 99.9% sure my sites will remain ugly.  There is a HUGE
>> > advantage in being able to hand a designer an HTML file that their
>> > copy of
>> > Dreamweaver understands.
>>
>> I'm attaching two screenshots hastily grabbed from my current Dabble
>> development image.  The HTML is identical for both; the first is how
>> it looks coming straight out of Seaside, the second is with some
>> external CSS applied.  Notice much difference?
>>
>> This is one of the areas where I allow myself to be opinionated.
>> Developers *should* be producing ugly (and therefore simple and
>> semantic) HTML.  A modern web designer's job isn't to modify that,
>> but to provide a stylesheet that makes that identical ugly HTML look
>> beautiful in the browser.  If your designer doesn't know how to work
>> that way, I strongly suggest that you find one who can (or I can put
>> you in touch with some).
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
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