RE: thoughts on Seaside 3.0

> In practice, the way it breaks down is this: the web designer hand
> codes the HTML, along with the CSS, in a mockup.  He is responsible
> for the specification, essentially, of what HTML will be generated,
> and he cares, as you explain very well, about the HTML being
> beautiful.
> 
> I translate this to programmatic generation, refactoring as I go - I
> am responsible for implementing abstractions that match his HTML.
> Very occasionally, I will change his HTML in order to make *my* code
> more beautiful, ie, to make the abstractions simpler.  But this is
> rare.
> 
> The longer we work on the same project, the faster this translation
> process is: a new mockup for a different page may have very different
> content and CSS, but the same basic patterns will appear in the HTML,
> and I can reuse the abstractions I already built.
> 
> The CSS is also iterated much, much more frequently than the HTML: he
> might commit tweaks to the CSS several times a day, but is unlikely to
> ask me to make a modification to the HTML more than once a week.

Ditto, once the programmer figures out the style of html the designer likes
and what things he likes to be tagged with id's or given class names, the
programmer can abstract these things and the workflow becomes much smoother.
I also let the designer build the initial HTML mock up when I then translate
to Seaside.  Initially, there's some effort required with programmer and
designer learning to work with each other, but when isn't that the case with
any two people?  

As with Avi, these days I get maybe 1 or 2 requests a month to make very
minor changes to the html because my site has to support many different
skins for different clients and the designer learned very quickly that this
only works if he confines his changes to CSS.  Changing the HTML for every
skin won't work, it'll break his other skins.  I think this was a valuable
lesson in abstraction for him that more designers need to learn.

"The reality of the web is that good graphic designers create XHTML by hand,
and giving good designers control only of the CSS (like in seaside 2.8)
isn't nearly enough."

That might be your reality, it isn't mine.  I'll let them create their HTML,
they just don't get to own or maintain it, HTML doesn't offer them the
necessary tools to do it properly, only code does, and that's why HTML
generation belong in the code where it's reusable and maintainable.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com