[Seaside] Questions regarding 2.7 deprecated api

[Lukas Renggli]

Hi Michel,

> I'm working on porting 2.7 to VW and I have questions about
> deprecated apis.

by using border, align, width, height, etc. you hardcode layout
information into your XHTML. It is not about being valid or not, but
about good style.

I know that behind every attribute there are a lot of feelings, e.g.
#cellspacing: and #cellpadding: are not deprecated anymore, as there
is no real CSS counterpart.

> To me it looks as if the whole attribute stuff would deserve a redesign.
> Would be nice if Seaside would use the real dtd to decide when to
> raise the deprecated api exception and if Seaside would let developers
> decide what dtd should be used (maybe no dtd at all to allow everything).

It would be certainly interesting to have a built in validator, but
that was not the idea of the deprecation API.

A similar thing to discuss are the latest changes you applied to
Seaside2.7a1-mb.169. One of the purposes of refactoring the
WAConfigurationEditor was to get rid of all that noise coming from the
hardcoded layout information. A goal was to make it styleable using a
nice CSS (the classes and the style-sheet are still missing) and to
get rid of all those <img>, <b>, <i> and style attributes. In my
opinion a plain XHTML looks better, even without style-information.

After a presentation advocating the nice properties of Seaside, e.g.
clean separation of XHTML and CSS, I accidently ended up showing the
dispatcher dialog to a group of Java programmers. Of course they
laughed when they saw that generated code.

WADispatchEditor, WACounter and WAStore are places where newbies look
first. They try to understand what happens there and learn from it.
Therefor think it is a bad idea to put excessive layout information
into anything in Seaside. Moreover this layout information prevents
any reuse of the components in a different context. Core code should
be minimal and easy to understand.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch