[TYPO3-english] Back-end module "pages" still rendered withtables

[JoH asenau]

> Tables are perfectly valid to render tabulated data, but as states
> Christopher, so called "experts" can disregard a tool only because of
> a rumor that it doesn't use divs where it "should" be.
>
> The idea behind my post is not about all that. I'm not trying to
> please any expert, all i'd like to achieve is to make the BE a little
> bit more flexible in order to make it look a bit more like the FE
> with a simple CSS.

And this is where our team stepped in at T3UXW09 with another idea:
Instead of having to apply any CSS at all you can get a flexible number of
up to 255 BE columns arranged in a grid (aka as table) editable via a grid
editor.

> It is pretty simple on the paper, all it takes is to replace the
> table whose class is 'typo3-page-cols' by 4 divs (or more depending
> on TCA) with float:left and a width of 100%/x and add an id such as
> id="colPos_x"
> This way, it doesn't change anything for most people and if someone
> wants to render the first column on top of the others (displayed like
> a header for example) he can using a simple additional CSS.

The problem is that you can not reproduce each and every colspan/rowspan
variant of a grid with floated divs only. You will need absolutely
positioned containers to acchieve that and this won't work with the variable
height of a variable number of content elements.

Since the BE already works with tables we just improved this behaviour to
get a better usability for editors. T3UXW09 was never about refactoring the
code completely.

For each grid record you can attach a small icon to show the available
layouts as "selicons" while editing the page record, which will give an
additional usability improvement. We are thinking about a frontend plugin
that will take care of the backend layout as well but currently it's done
with simple TypoScript CONTENT, which is working easily because each backend
container represents a "colPos".

Since we are currently working with the prototype on a real project, I will
make a video to show the basic concept. Maybe the decision makers then will
get the same "Woooow!" effect as most of the people who have already seen it
in action ;-)

Could be a good talk/discussion for T3DD10 as well, what dou you think?

BTW: Actually "float" was not meant to position containers at all but to
have text float around just one container.

HTH

Joey

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