Neil Harris wrote:
At the moment, only PHP coders can re-design skins. This is bad, since good coding skills and good design skills are not strongly correlated. With all the effort being devoted to tweaking the current layout, and arguing about it, we could instead be doing two things:
- decoupling code from content by using text-only template files
instead of PHP code to control the final assembly of page content
- decoupling content from graphical presentation by using CSS more
thoroughly
Great idea........
This then turns making new skins into something that can be done by regular logged-in users with only graphic design / Web skills, without any security or performance implications. By allowing them to edit their own template and CSS files _on the Wiki itself_, we can enable them to show off their skin designs to other users.
Up to this point! Do you know how many times I reload a design in Mozilla, Netscape, Ie and Opera? Ever 30 seconds or so. There is no way I could work on designs within the wiki system. It would simply take too long.
We can then hold a beauty contest without elaborate votes... by doing, rather than by talking.
Talking is better. A beauty contest .... we'd get "The header of design A is nice" "The footer of design B is nice". If we *talk* we can set out design goals and clear ways to implement them.
This would also make designing a new layout much more interesting as a general design competition for graphic designers. The fly in the ointment is backwards compatibility to ancient and brain-dead browsers such as IE 3.0 and Netscape 4.7. What we need for these is a special backwards-compatibility skin, just for these, and some server-side browser sniffing to deliver this skin instead of the normal default skin for these broken browsers.
Nice idea. Is it feasible?