[Zope3-dev] Template usage

[Alexander Limi]

Hi,

This is Godefroid and Alexander writing, and as you may have discovered 
we've done some updates to the Rotterdam skin. We've changed the color 
scheme (to please the people that disliked the Plone colors), and moved 
things around quite a bit.

In particular we have moved the actions into an "Action Bar" at the top, 
similar to toolbars in applications. We have further plans with this, so 
bear with  us for a while here, things aren't complete yet. :)

This mail will mainly discuss the current concept of having a separate 
template for dialog forms.

At the moment, we have two top-level templates in Z3, the main template, 
simply called template.pt, and the dialog template called dialog_macros.pt.

We agree with the rationale behind having a way to separate the two page 
types, but we don't think it should be done by having two separate 
templates. The main template can easily be reused for this, the only thing 
needed is a way to decide whether a page is a view or falls into a 
different category (for example a dialog page or maybe a wizard page for 
novice and setup interfaces later on).

If we're able to detect whether a PT is rendering a view or a dialog, we 
can simply hide the irrelevant parts.

How this should be done technically, we will leave up to you, but seeing as 
the GlobalMenuBrowserService (hope I got that right ;) is already able to 
decide whether a view is selected or not, it should be able to tell us when 
there are no applicable views on a page - like the case of a dialog.

So any suggestions on how to do this are appreciated, as we need a 
mechanism that is easy to enforce and maintain.

Actually hiding too much of the interface confuses the user more than 
helping, since you in a way "pull out the rug" under him by removing things 
he normally relies on, like the navigation box or similar items. Removing 
non-applicable items is ok, but most of the other elements should be kept 
where they usually are. So in the case of dialogs, we will be hiding the 
view tabs and the action bar, while keeping navigation and personalized 
elements.

An example is checked in in the Grant action dialog, where we've simply 
emptied the action and view slots. This is not the way to do it 
programmatically, just a visual example.

On a related note, we need cancel buttons on any screen that is a form 
where you make decisions. One example is the Role Permission Mapping form, 
which has a Save Changes button, but no Cancel button. We should remember 
this when creating dialog forms.

And lastly, a small note from the XHTML dictator:
Apart from some rare cases, you're doing a very good job at keeping markup 
clean. We will fix the remaining occurences as we plod along into the code.

In general:

- Don't style ANY HTML elements. Ever. :)
  - Don't use tables unless you have specific tabular data
  - No colors should be specified
  - Use <strong> and <em>, not <b> or <i> to emphasize text

It's better that the code is clean and looks a bit ugly visually right now 
than us having to remove redundant code when re-styling things. Most pages 
should look good with minimal markup (like p and strong tags).

-- 
Godefroid Chapelle and Alexander Limi