Re: [Gnue-dev] Layout Management and Forms

[John Lenton]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 01:08:52PM -0500, Jason Cater wrote:
> I don't follow.  How does CSS play any role in what we're doing?

CSS are relevant here because they give us a separate, orthogonal
namespace in which to talk about attributes of the widgets and
stuff we define in the XML. So do namespaces, but IMHO CSS is
cleaner because then we could take say

    <form>
    
     <!-- snip -->
    
     <page>
       <block>
         <label name="label1" text="Hello world!"/>
         <label name="label2" text="You want more text to appear?"/>
         <label name="label3" text="Another comment"/>
         <entry name="entry1"/>
       </block>
     </page>
    </form>

and a separate file with say

    form { layout_engine: Kamada-Kaway }

  Notes: 
  - no, I don't propose we try to use Kamada-Kaway for automagic
    layout of forms. I just used a name I knew :)
  - note that the names of the labels aren't needed for automagic    
    layout engines such as whatever entity (http://entity.cx)
    uses

or

    #label1 { x: 1; y: 1 }
    #label2 { x: 1; y: 3 }
    #label3 { x: 1; y: 5 }
    #entry1 { x: 3; y: 1 }

or

    block { fill: spread }
    label { valign: top }
    entry { expand: both; valign: center; halign: center }

or we could add a 'class' attribute, but we probably don't want
to go there (do we?).

Also if we're careful about overrides, i.e. if we make sure that
if the user does

    label { x: 1; y: 1; halign: center }

the behaviour is well-defined, then there'd be no need to forbid
(but yes maybe deprecate) the 'old-style' absolute positioning
attributes (how to get them in due time to whatever does the css
handling is another problem :)


Having said all the above, the core forms team (yourself
included) have made a good case for leaving this at the bottom of
the TODO list. It's glitz.

-- 
John Lenton (address@hidden) -- Random fortune:
Tourist to New Yorker:
        "Pardon me, sir, do you know what time it is, or should I
        just go fuck myself?"