[TYPO3-hci] Kickoff: TYPO3 4.1 (suggestions)

[Christopher]

Tapio Markula wrote:
> Robert Markula kirjoitti:
> 
>> 3. If possible, do away with layout-tables. Ok, accessibility can be 
>> achieved with layout tables, and pure CSS-based layout tends to bring 
>> problems with browser-compatibility and needs ugly hacks. 
> 
> yes - I don't rely on float -property - it might cause unexpected
> 

'Ugly hacks' are only very seldom necessary, and 'float' is very stable 
on all modern browsers. There is only really one major weirdness about 
IE's implementation of float and that's that it encloses the child 
elements of floats (it's not supposed to).

The so-called 'float bugs' in IE are irritating, but they are not only 
caused by problems with how IE renders floats. A better term for them 
would be 'haslayout' bugs, and they are very often fixable with one line 
in an IE-only stylesheet. '#selector { zoom:1; }' often works, for 
example. The various 'haslayout' bugs in IE are generally quite 
predictable, and not usually difficult to squash.

Having said that, there may very well be places in the BE where tables 
are not technically the best /markup/ (i.e. in the sense of metadata), 
but may be the best implementation we can come up with in the short 
term. I'd like to see the layout tables gone, but if it's not practical 
to get 'em all, we can still zap some of them.

Another thing to remember is that in the BE we can potentially drop 
support for particularly troublesome UAs although since the most 
troublesome one out there is the IE 5-6 family, I guess we're stuck with 
the worst offenders no matter what we do :-)

In any case, I would /love/ to see the backend's markup and 
skinnability/templatability improve. My particular strength is with 
writing markup and CSS, so I'd like to offer to consult on the BE's 
markup and styles; what I don't know is how best to achieve that. I 
could, for example, take sections out of the existing BE and rewrite 
them in a leaner, more modern way, but I don't know if that process will 
fit into any concurrent re-coding of the application logic. I suppose 
introducing templating for the BE is out of the question at this point?

I guess we'd also need to decide how (if) the in-markup javascript 
attributes will stay in place. It'd be nice to see both the scripts and 
the event handlers move into external files, but I have no idea if this 
is practical or not.

The point is, I'm willing to write markup and styles for the BE either 
as standalone sample pages if that would be helpful, or to write markup 
on-demand for developers working in the BE php/js code.

Is anybody else interested in trying to update the BE?

-Christopher