[Slashcode-development] some of my thoughts/requests for slashcode devel

[James M. <jm...@tr...>]

Hi all,

To the fine folks who develop slashcode regularly, thanks for your
work. 

What I am most concerned with at the moment is migrating my website
style from tables to CSS.  

(By way of background, I use slashcode more as a library than as a
readymade website.  I use the login and authentication stuff without
ever looking at the code, I use the DB interface, and I use the
template toolkit display calls.  And of course, I use the admin
interface to edit templates. )

Over the weekend I finally had a look at that write up on A List Apart
mentioned a few weeks ago in slashdot.  Now I've got one site
rendering in xhtml strict, with a css style sheet, and not a table tag
in site.  But to do so I push in lots of stuff for the CSS template
through a hashref when I call the make header routine, and most
egregiously, I hacked the menu system, overloading the "value" entries
to also set the id tag for each list item, as in:

 <ul>[% FOR i = items %]
  [%- myvalue = i.value -%]
  [%- matches = myvalue.match('(op).(\w+)\"') %]
  <li id="nav-[%- matches.1 -%]"><a [% i.value %]>[% i.label %]</a></li>
 [% END %]</ul>


Couple of thoughts on this (having not looked at CVS code, btw).
First, I can only seem to access the menu entries in the menus table
by a mysql console, not the admin interface.  Is this a feature or a
bug?  Second, the menus table could use another hook or two for style
sheets, to avoid my ugly text parsing hack.  Something like 

styleid varchar (20) NOT NULL, 
styleclass varchar(20) NOT NULL default "menuitem",

would probably do it.  I would do that, but the code that renders the
menu would need to be changed, thus breaking my compatibility with the
slash libraries. (Hmm, I just thought that maybe it is possible to
subclass something like the Environment module to override that
function???)  Third, I am not sure whether it is appropriate to put
the css style sheet in a separate, static file, or render it with a
template.  I do the latter right now, since my usage sets the names of
style ids on the fly based on passed arguments, so that I can add to
the menu with minimal fuss, as in:

... perl to get an arraref to my menu values (parsing op="text"
entries), passed as navids to template ...

[% FOREACH nid = navids %] #[%- nid %] #nav-[%- nid %][%- ', ' UNLESS loop.last -%]
 [% END %]  {
    background-position:0 -150px;
    border-width:0;
}

[% FOREACH nid = navids %] #[%- nid %] #nav-[%- nid %] a[%- ', ' UNLESS loop.last -%]
 [% END %]  {
    background-position:100% -150px;
    padding-bottom:5px;
    color:#333;
}

(which copies shamelessly a technique from another article in A List
Apart)

Any thoughts on static versus dynamic css?  I think the bandwidth
savings quoted by the "recoding slashdot" article depend upon a cached
css file.  Perhaps if the css file is dynamically rendered, then the
savings go poof.  An alternative is to have a mix; some css static,
other stuff dynamic, as files static_layout.css, static_markup.css,
and then any dynamic styles pushed into the header after the
stylesheet include commands.

But I think the attraction of slashcode to me is dynamically
generating and rendering content.  Philosophically, should the the css
be considered decoration that can be static, like the various icons
and borders, or dynamic, like the content?  I think it should be
dynamic, since it opens up more possibilities (such as the extensible
menu styles above), and it puts the code in the db where it can be
manipulated through temlate toolkit.

hoping this long post is appropriate for this list,
James