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

[Quentin Dewhurst]

> 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?

I too like this idea,  I think it should be entirely possible to represent 
the front end by parsing the front end template(s) - and taking its 
underlying table structure in order to display the available content areas 
in a more logical fashion (so long as the layout wasnt driven entirely by 
CSS).   We did have a thread going some time ago about this (called the 
constant triptocon i do believe). My workload has been obscene though the 
past few months so havent had time to give it much more thought, hopefully 
things will lighten up very soon!  so in otherwords yes i'm also interested 
in pursuing this further.

Cheers, Quentin.