This link arrive in an email today. Looks interesting - any thought on integrating with a Freeway built site?
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It’s not really going to fit into a Freeway-built site, but it would be worth learning, since it’s the best layout style technique currently going. For decades, we have been pressing other things into this service – starting with using tables and clear GIF images to create a physical layout in a language (HTML) that did not have any notion (beyond an outline hierarchy and the various sizes of H tags) of physical structure. Then CSS came along, and people started using DIVs and width and height to create physical structure, which was at least a general separation of content and structure, but again, using something that wasn’t designed for gridded layouts to create a grid and assign content to that grid. For one thing, the order of content in HTML often did make a difference in how you could arrange that content visually on the screen.
But Freeway isn’t going to have anything to do with this, since it uses CSS DIVs to structure the layout (or, if you rock it old-school, tables). And there’s no way I can think of to use Freeway to generate this.
If you follow this course, you will learn how to create a CSS grid layout using nothing more elaborate than a text editor and a browser. Do not be afraid, though, as it’s a lot less daunting than it may seem. Yes, it is rigorously non-visual. You have to imagine what you’re going to build, and then select tools from this new toolkit to give you the look you want. The truly beautiful thing about this is that you can organize your page content into a structure – an outline – that defines the ranking of what’s most important to what’s least important. And then, after you have organized your content that way, you can mess with it endlessly – move things around the page without changing their order in the document, for a simple example. And once you can do that with one page, you can do it for an entire site full of pages, just by applying the same stylesheet to the other pages.
Worth learning, yes, absolutely. Related to Freeway, not at this time.
Walter
On Jan 20, 2018, at 1:07 PM, Frank H email@hidden wrote:
This link arrive in an email today. Looks interesting - any thought on integrating with a Freeway built site?
CSS Grid — Learn all about CSS Grid with Wes Bos in this free video series!
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There are some Visual Tools to help learn it also.
Pinegrow - CSS Grid
CSS Grid Builder , offered by CoffeeCup
Firefox Developer Edition - CSS Visual Grid Helpers
Etc.,
Also it should be noted that depending on your demographic you may need a “polyfill fallback” for those on unsupported browsers.
Etc.,
In this regard, what are your thoughts or assumptions on Freeway going forward with the rewrite. Do you think it will stick with its DIV approach or move forward with FlexBox, CSS Grid, or implement a framework like BootStrap, Foundation, etc., ?
I guess most of it depends on support for backwards compatibility with older files, but at some point legacy needs left behind, this seems like the chance for that. I am curious what decisions will be made by Softpress.
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I really doubt that Freeway would ever become just another Bootstrap or Foundation editor. That may become a layout flavor, but the core audience for Freeway has always been the traditional graphic designer. They like to start with a blank page more often than not.
I have a feeling that the first pass at this will support the same code styles as Freeway 7, with whatever interface affordances can be added to make the responsive design more intuitive. But it’s important to remember that when Freeway 3 added CSS layout as a first-class citizen (Freeway 2 allowed you to create “layers”, which were absolutely-positioned DIVs floating above the one-and-only table-based layout grid below), they were able to do so using an export module in the application, rather than changing the core app entirely. This meant that any existing documents would open just fine, and you could move forward with the new layout method at your own pace, or use the new hotness in a new blank document.
Freeway has always had an internal document model that is not even HTML at all, and these export modules allow that model to be “dumbed down” to whatever your chosen flavor of HTML will support. I forget which version dropped support for HTML 3.2, but I do know it was recently removed. You could, with the same visual layout, export HTML 3.2, HTML 4, HTML 4 Strict, XHTML, or XHTML Strict. (I think they dropped 3.2 whenever they added HTML5.) Following this lead, I suspect that a CSS Grid output module would not be difficult to add (famous last words). If anything, it may be easier than the current inline layout is to work with, because you simply direct which column and which offset you want a box to occupy, which is more or less akin to how Freeway stores your design internally. Switching to that output mode might make the grid visible, and visibly snap your drawn elements to that grid, but I suspect even that would not be required, since you can just make the grid finer-pitched if everything doesn’t line right up in a “standard” 12 columns.
All of the various other site builders you can buy today use HTML as their document format, which means they are using what amounts to a prettified version of the Safari Developer Tools interface to manipulate the actual HTML. This means you have to know (and choose) which version of HTML you want to use, and you have to live with the fact that if you make enough changes in your layout, you will eventually break something in a difficult-to-diagnose manner. Freeway has never had that problem, because it doesn’t store your design in HTML at all. If you make any change at all to a page, that page is thrown away and re-generated from scratch at the next publish or preview. There’s never any coding-with-a-blender going on.
Now if Freeway X (my name for whatever comes next) were to take a completely different approach (which I doubt it will), they could use the goodies provided by WebKit and JavaScriptKit (and all the other *Kits) and make a kick-ass HTML editor, and probably stick with HTML5 only. They could have the import process from an old document just slurp up the HTML from the Site Folder and move ahead with that. But if they did, I don’t know if there would be anything special to make that new application stand apart from all the competition who have been doing just that for many years. Softpress’s special sauce has always been true WYSIWYG DTP layout with multiple output modes. I don’t know if they’d want to give up that distinctiveness, and become just another Dreamweaver clone.
The real question for today’s designers is, “does that matter”? Is it a difference without distinction to be able to build anything at all, rather than just mix and match the elements of one of the popular CSS frameworks? That’s the needle that Softpress will have to thread if they want this rebirth to last.
Walter
On Jan 20, 2018, at 5:08 PM, FreewayPro_User email@hidden wrote:
In this regard, what are your thoughts or assumptions on Freeway going forward with the rewrite. Do you think it will stick with its DIV approach or move forward with FlexBox, CSS Grid, or implement a framework like BootStrap, Foundation, etc., ?
I guess most of it depends on support for backwards compatibility with older files, but at some point legacy needs left behind, this seems like the chance for that. I am curious what decisions will be made by Softpress.
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Thanks for your detailed feedback and response, both in referring back and looking forward even speculatively.
It’s certainly a fork in the road, with many important decisions to be made by Softpress. It will be interesting to see what comes down the road and if the chosen route leads to fruition along with financial solvency and product success.
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Wow Walter!
As usual you have given me a great deal of insight into what is quite overwhelming at times to me - I like the suggestions and will give be keeping this thread as my assignment sheet for at least a few weeks. 
Thank you so much.
Sent from my iPad
On Jan 20, 2018, at 3:23 PM, FreewayPro_User email@hidden wrote:
Thanks for your detailed feedback and response, both in referring back and looking forward even speculatively.
It’s certainly a fork in the road, with many important decisions to be made by Softpress. It will be interesting to see what comes down the road and if the chosen route leads to fruition along with financial solvency and product success.
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