I’ve heard some major griping about the current state of the Freeway
“box model” layout technique. All deserved, in my opinion…
One of the things that makes Freeway in table mode so magical is the
way that it infers what you’re trying to do, layout-wise, and just
gets it done. Never mind if in the background you have built the
mother of all tables to hold things steady, in the end there is a near-
perfect concordance between design model and browser output.
Having to create nested inline HTML boxes and set floats and whatever
else is good for you, in the same way that regular exercise is, but
both boring and fraught with pain in exactly the same way.
I’d like to see Freeway making nested DIVs for me, unless I had taken
the step to mark a particular DIV as a floating layer.
If all I’ve done is draw a few boxes one above the other, it would be
entirely reasonable for Freeway to merge those together into a common
container, just as it does currently with non-layer objects. The
example for this would be the View > HTML Layout menu option, where
you can see the page table as a separate overlay from the rest of the
design. There are some simple rules that govern when this table will
get split – if there is a horizontal “gutter” running through the
page of more than 2px height, the table will split along that line. If
a similar rule was followed you could set the layout engine to
determine what should push what out of the way. The current system of
manually inserting a nested DIV would remain, and would be very useful
for things such as inset images or pull-quotes or anything else where
you want to have text wrap around elements. But for basic vertical
stretch, I think it’s possible that Freeway could step up and
calculate the design intent a bit more cleverly – just like it
already does when laying out tables.
I vote we all give Softpress the financial resources to do everything we want them to do… No? Then I guess we must take the cold potato and wait for the full meal that is yet to be served.
Would it be beneficial to redo the screen-cast and perhaps just show people some basic layout techniques using the box-model? Or should I quit while I’m ahead.
I think people always want to have an easy way of replicating some things that they see on other sites. Although there are may types of layout they all seem to cluster round a few - see WordPress for that - and maybe tutorials on those would be good.
It takes many minutes to create a layout but only a few to give it content. We all start with content and then have issues with the presentation of that content. The faster it is to build the faster the content gets added.
Everyone wants to be able to do everything in this one program that can’t do everything and then hopefully find an easy way to do it without learning themselves how it works. People are also afraid to read the manual, perhaps if the manual wasn’t a beast of a PDF and perhaps put out online to read on actual HTML pages that there wouldn’t be so many “manual-ready” questions.
Dan - I read the manual but as you know from Freeway talk, there are a whole bunch of easy things that trip people up all the time that are not explained in the manual.
I think that in the time that Freeway has been around ( and thankfully still here), putting together a web page/site has become more tricky. At first FWY was the easier option to the rather complicated (and expensive) Dreamweaver, as I seem to remember. Still FWY seems not to have made much headway into the market dominated by Dreamweaver (maybe I am wrong). I talk to anybody in web design and they go “huh?”. That’s not all bad though.
So, where is their market if not with heavy code centric design agencies? Well, with the kind of entrepreneur/ occasional designer like some of us who are on this site perhaps. If so, one of the major issues is getting the little things right. Many of us just can’t afford to be fiddling around ‘trying’ to make things work for hours on end. In fact I see a gradual exodus to WordPress, Blogger etc. in the long run. Nice beautiful structures, slip the content in and go. You can already see that happening.
I am not having a swing at FWY because I see it as a really beautiful thing in general and I am extremely grateful that we have it and all the wonderful people here offering their brain power for no reward.
I chose Freeway for making my own sites because I could just do it - mostly
from a design sense that expressed rather than constructed.
The auto table layout that Freeway made was and to me still is - marvellous
and it just works in most all situations that I need it to.
I have too much else that my attention enjoys to learn this other approach
as it needs an internal model flashed into my brain rather than simply
expressing out of a DTP sense of boxes - and it has a lot more liability to
break in certain platform/browsers.
But the web changes and SP had to change with it. Walter’s suggestion is
good and I trust that SP desire to bring Freeway again into a relatively
design led approach even with CSS positioning.
I guess the shot hits the fan for me when browsers cease to support table
based layout. Or when I get a fresh set of brain cells to ‘get it’ because I
seem to sense a mentality of hierarchies and relationships that I haven’t
gotten.
all the best
Brian
John-Paul Kernot said recently:
Dan - I read the manual but as you know from Freeway talk, there are a whole
bunch of easy things that trip people up all the time that are not explained
in the manual.
I think that in the time that Freeway has been around ( and thankfully still
here), putting together a web page/site has become more tricky. At first FWY
was the easier option to the rather complicated (and expensive) Dreamweaver,
as I seem to remember. Still FWY seems not to have made much headway into the
market dominated by Dreamweaver (maybe I am wrong). I talk to anybody in web
design and they go “huh?”. That’s not all bad though.
So, where is their market if not with heavy code centric design agencies?
Well, with the kind of entrepreneur/ occasional designer like some of us who
are on this site perhaps. If so, one of the major issues is getting the little
things right. Many of us just can’t afford to be fiddling around ‘trying’ to
make things work for hours on end. In fact I see a gradual exodus to
WordPress, Blogger etc. in the long run. Nice beautiful structures, slip the
content in and go. You can already see that happening.
I am not having a swing at FWY because I see it as a really beautiful thing in
general and I am extremely grateful that we have it and all the wonderful
people here offering their brain power for no reward.
You don’t need none of this CSS div malarky to hold page content together, just a bit of solid scaffold (tables) … see I’ve said it twice … and my therapist told to me, I couldn’t do it.
Well I’m oft’ down the pub now to find a free microphone to give some karaoke high notes to sing about non nested divs’ versus tables – I expect I’ll be back quite soon :•)
