[Seaside] Rails and Seaside

[Adrian Lienhard]

There has been the idea around to allow designers to manipulate CSS  
directly by connecting from their preferred tool via FTP to Squeak.  
Hence, no need to send static HTML files around and integrate their  
CSS. Lukas and Ian implemented the FTP Server (see http:// 
www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView? 
showComments=true&entry=3303394043); to hook this up to Seaside's CSS  
definitions should be pretty simple...

Adrian


On Jan 7, 2006, at 01:06 , Cees De Groot wrote:

> Wow, what a thread.
>
> On the blog: the guy is right, of course. He notes that Seaside has a
> higher S/N ratio but he also notes that most programmers out there are
> a bit rusty, inflexible, and unlikely to make easy shifts.
>
> That's the very reason I haven't learned Lisp yet :-).
>
> On CSS: I agree 100% with Avi. It's a pity that I'm still developing
> my latest in CSS, but it's a typical example (url's in a couple of
> weeks when the site is live).
>
> I generate ugly HTML (with VAST WebConnect, there really is no choice
> there ;-)), with at best validation javascript. The site is accessed
> through a CGI forwarder. Which means that I hand the designers:
> - the contents of /cgi-bin
> - the url in /cgi-bin that starts the app
> - a promise to include /style/global.css in every page
> - a promise to  include /style/<pagename>.css in every page
> - a promise to  include /js/<pagename>.js in every page
> The latter two files are optional, it's a bit ugly but browsers don't
> complain about missing files Of course, a round of 'touch' commands
> could be used as well. In any case, I don't bother with any static
> files, they can set it up and even use whatever webserver they want
> (this particular bunch seems to insist on IIS).
>
> The idea is that my adorned (classes and ids all over the place) HTML
> can be layed out by default by a global css script. It was a first for
> them, but I handed them a sample script based on a static html design
> (created in, err, 2.5 hours - and that's mostly because I'm lousy at
> CSS) and they worked from there, producing two completely differently
> looking sites in a couple of days (the idea is that this site is
> marketed to various demographic segments, each gets its own
> look&feel). If they want to get groovy, they can override stuff on a
> per-page basis by providing a page-specific css file (used to do
> button image replacement - in a wizard-style screen, when the "next"
> button needs to be labeled, say, "order now" in the last screen, for
> example).
>
> And today they found out why I insisted on offering them javascript
> hooks as well, they got the idea to replace some header stuff with
> flash using javascript :-)
>
> The designers have near total freedom (granted, css can be a bit
> harder than old school webdesign, but only a bit), and I can purely
> concentrate on business logic. This really works, and to an extent
> that goes beyond anything that I've ever accomplished or seen with
> templates. That's a very real advantage, both technical and
> business-wise, and should not be ignored.
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