7 Jan
2011
7 Jan
'11
noon
Hi all,
On 01/07/2011 10:29 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
On 01/04/2011 05:44 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
This comes from the fact that yday with Marius we did an exercise trying
to figure out how one would _customize_ their office viewer macro to
implement the slideshow feature, for example.
Options:
1/ they put their own class to the macro and then provide their own js
to implement it. Since this custom js is just an improvement, it uses
the existing one. First question, how to include these jss in the pages?
1.1.a/ include always -- performance issue, it makes the customization
less efficient that the original, which is not fair
1.1.b/ include on demand, before calling the office viewer. This makes
it impossible for normal users to use the office viewer macro (they will
need to know they need to include js before calling it, which is
completely unrealistic and hardly achievable in wysiwyg)
Second issue is that:
1.2/ when this 'customization' is done, all existing calls to the office
viewer macro will need to be changed to be passed the new cssClass value.
2/ they overwrite the js and css provided in the jars, in
WEB-INF/classes. Besides the fact that this is a little SF for the
normal web dev which expects his CSS to not be stored in the binaries
folder, iirc and if my little experiment was correct, it requires
container restart for any change to be taken into account. Also it
requires filesystem access, which if we could avoid it would be great. I
understand we want to discourage these modification of default resources
because it makes upgrade a pita but, as I saw above, we don't have yet a
mechanism to overload / overwrite properly.
These are not to say it's impossible, are to say it feels like such a
pain and almost anti-intuitive, for the _normal_ webdev. Andreas before
has said enough about how easy it should be and, although I don't fully
agree with his arguments, I find the options above in the complete
opposite direction.
On 12/28/2010 04:13 PM, Anca Luca wrote:
I agree with Sergiu, I'm +1 for 2b _but_ I don't think it's enough. I
think we also need a mechanism to decouple the client side (precisely
the JavaScript and the CSS) from the server side (i.e. macro component
implementation). Let me give you an example:
I'm writing an image gallery macro. The macro itself collects images
from some source (e.g. document attachments) and generates:
(% class="gallery" %)
(((
image:firstImageReference
image:secondImageReference
...
image:lastImageReference
)))
This needs to be enhanced with JavaScript and CSS. Why should the macro
care what JavaScript code and what CSS style sheets are loaded as long
as they serve their role: the "gallery" role. So IMO the macro should
use a JavaScript/CSS "component manager" to import the resources
required for the "gallery" role. I can bundle a "default
implementation"
in the macro jar but it should be possible to overwrite it from within
the wiki. For instance I could add a "SkinExtensionMapping" object to
the page holding a skin extension to map it to the "gallery" role. This
way whenever I use the gallery macro my customized JavaScript/CSS will
be requested on demand. Hi guys,
Short story:
Where to put the css which is needed by java macros (e.g. the columns
layouting of the container macro)
1/ in colibri.css
2/ in a .css included on demand by the macro
a) from platform resources (using ssfx)
b) from the jar (using ssrx)
c) from an object in a page with ssx
3/ refactor the skin concept and create a 'platform css' to store all
these and not be affected by skin customization.
Long story:
I can see I've caused the web standards tests to fail for the trunk
(http://hudson.xwiki.org/job/xwiki-product-enterprise-tests/org.xwiki.enterp…)
because of the inline style attributes used by the columns layout of the
container, whijch is now used on the main page.
Now, I would like us to agree about where to store the styles needed by
the java macros to work right, such as the container macro with columns
layout. The options I see are:
1/ as until today (e.g. box macro, warning, error, info, etc), in
colibri.css/toucan.css/otherskinwehave.css. I don't like this solution
too much because it means that when another skin is used, things won't
work anymore unless the person writing the new skin takes care of
copying all these "things that must be there". The advantage of this is
having a single .css file to load on page load, the disadvantage being
that their css is loaded on all pages, regardless of it being used or not.
2/ loading of the styles on demand, each macro loads its style when it
needs it
a) from a .css file located in the platform resources, which the macro
has to include using the ssfx plugin when is executed -- much like a
wiki macro would to with a ssx.
b) from a .css file located in the macro archive (using ssrx), which the
macro includes when executed.
c) from a ssx page
c) has the advantage of being very very much more easy to change than a)
and finally than b) which is the hardest to customize. But on the other
side c) means the java macro depends on a page, which is not that good.
Note that "cascading" customization is possible for all these choices
(adding an extra css with rules to overwrite the rules in the default
css for the macro) and that in my view, it's enough, since the idea is
that the layout should be preserved no matter what (e.g. a user might
want to add a red border to the columns, but not make the columns
display as two paragraphs instead of two columns).
3/ refactoring the whole skin thing and creating a "platform" css, which
contains things that should work regardless of the skin used. Pros: it's
an adaptation of the current approach (1/), that solves the problem.
Cons: takes longer, might be very hard to separate what's platform and
what's skin.
These being said, I think I prefer 2/ if 3/ is not realistic, and for
the container macro at least, I would prefer to implement 2b).
Strong +1 for 2b over the other options. colibri.css should not contain
component style, just general layout.
I don't think that the overriding disadvantage of 2b holds, since users
are not supposed to _change_ platform styles at all, be they in wiki
documents as SSX objects or as "hidden" .css files inside jars. Changing
platform skin that way makes it much harder to upgrade to a newer
version. CSS overrides in a custom skin or a custom SSX is the proper
way to do that.
The other disadvantage, about HTTP request proliferation, I've always
said it and I repeat it once more, this is how XWiki works in
_development_ mode. For production static website intended for massive
workload, all the static resources need to be optimized: combine CSS and
JS in one big file, combine images into sprites, move static resources
to a CDN... Maybe we should write this down in the administration guide,
and maybe offer some tools that can help with that (like a tool which
gathers all skin files from the jars, the skins and the SSX objects,
concatenates them, feeds sends them through YUI minifier, then outputs a
zip with the resulting 1 JS and 1 CSS file to put in the CDN).
WDYT?
Normally yes, we should have js/css components, it would really be
supercool. BUT, since I don't see that happening very soon, I kind of
changed my mind about 2b until the js/css components are implemented.
Because if we start applying 2b all over, it's gonna take at least 2-3-4
versions of XWiki until we're gonna have a decent way to overwrite those
(js components), and in the mean time we'll have at least 3 macros
bundled which are not customizable properly (container, dashboard,
office viewer). I don't find this ok.
If I had to write my macros as an extension of xwiki, not to be bundled
in the default build and distributed with the default distribution, i
would agree to go for 2b, because then I wouldn't distribute my build
(with the macro in it) to other people pretending to distribute an
extensible platform.
I am preparing XWIKI-5843 with ssfx (that is 2a).
Thanks,
Anca
Thanks,
Marius
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