On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
This sort of thing can be accomplished by pure CSS -- having standard classes that hide things on mobile or on print -- or slightly more complicatedly with more parser fun having output format knowledge or replacement chunks... I think I recommend using CSS to avoid complicating things. ;)
Potentially hidden items could also be stripped from view to avoid transferring extra data, though...
Particularly in regards to mobile as well as slow connections, you've hit the nail on the head. While doing everything with CSS might be a more elegant approach, we need to be able to have much more control over what data gets sent to the device, and when. That said, I don't think what I am proposing is incongruous with doing it all with CSS. The skin system can handle either approach, and if the view system is implemented correctly with fallbacks/overridability/etc, an administrator should be able to finely tune behavior depending on needs.
Probably the most important thing is having smart fallbacks; if there's a customized desktop skin, but no mobile or print version of it, then on print or mobile view we should fall back to the default mobile or print skin rather than getting stuck on the preferred desktop skin.
This'd make
it easy to customize the desktop view while still having things work sanely in other views -- and having standard naming makes it easy to then go ahead and customize the mobile view too.
Yah, totally agreed.
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Internet users generally expect a separate printable view, and we can certainly consider in the future whether it's worth it to maintain the print stylesheet on what's nearly always an online-only view.
I agree with this as well. For the time being, if people are OK with me moving forward on this, I can leave the print functionality as-is and start implementing the view system around it. Down the road, we can figure out the best approach to handling print display.