Re: [Rainbowportal-devel] Introduction to Zen

[Rick B. <ric...@fl...>]

Zen seems like a *great* step Jeremy! I think it will really make it 
easier for our designers to work with Rainbow and I hope that leads to a 
more active design community. However even with Zen looking to be a huge 
improvement on it's own in reading what you've prepared I can't help but 
think some of the sIFR work done by Mike Davidson (post page render 
activity that replaces ugly HTML with Flash). Maybe not a necessary next 
step per say, or one I can advocate, but I do think it's one that might 
excite yet another community an it's interesting enough to mention; take 
a look.

Examples here:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/sifr.html - resize your 
window, hit refresh, repeat

Description here:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr

"The following explains the sIFR process:

   1. A page is requested and loaded.
   2. JavaScript detects if Flash 6 or greater is installed.
   3. If no Flash is detected, the page is drawn as normal.
   4. If Flash is detected, the HTML element of the page is immediately
      given the class “hasFlash”. This effectively hides all text areas
      to be replaced but keeps their bounds intact. The text is hidden
      because of a style in the style sheet which only applies to
      elements that are children of the html.hasFlash element.
   5. The javascript traverses through the DOM and finds all elements to
      be replaced. Once found, the script measures the offsetWidth and
      offsetHeight of the element and replaces it with a Flash movie of
      the same dimensions.
   6. The Flash movie, knowing its textual content, creates a dynamic
      text field and renders the text at a very large size (96pt).
   7. The Flash movie reduces the point size of the text until it all
      fits within the overall size of the movie."


-Rick

Jeremy Esland wrote:

> Attached is an HTML version of the first piece of Zen documentation. 
> My apologies to all that this has taken so long to get out.
> This document is also now available in the CVS as a 
> Rainbow/Documentation file.
> The next few documents will follow within a few days.
> Jes1111
>