FW6 and footers

There probably isn’t any new way to make a footer automatically position itself at the end of all content. Please tell me I’m wrong!

However, if not, to achieve something similar I tried to make the footer item Fixed in Window with a 0px (or 0%) bottom position. In FW5 this placed the footer at the bottom of the page, and was fairly acceptable.

But in FW6 the same settings seem to place it at the bottom of the browser window instead of the page. How do I make it act like a footer in FW6?


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Hi John -

If you are placing your footer below your content, how is it not appearing
after your content? Clearly I am missing something from your
description. Do you have a link to a published example, so I can see what
you mean?


Ernie Simpson

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 10:09 PM, John Cooper email@hidden wrote:

There probably isn’t any new way to make a footer automatically position
itself at the end of all content. Please tell me I’m wrong!

However, if not, to achieve something similar I tried to make the footer
item Fixed in Window with a 0px (or 0%) bottom position. In FW5 this placed
the footer at the bottom of the page, and was fairly acceptable.

But in FW6 the same settings seem to place it at the bottom of the browser
window instead of the page. How do I make it act like a footer in FW6?


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Hi Ernie, right, of course the footer appears at the bottom if I keep moving it there, so perhaps you are missing something: the word “automatically”.

For the longest time it’s been a peeve for many that FW can’t devise an Action that automatically places an item below all content. If there were, you could apply it to a footer in a Master Page and it would always be where you want it on every page regardless of page length.

I was wondering whether FW6 had provided that.

Assuming not – I was saying that the work around provided by FW is to make a footer Fixed in Window with a 0px (or 0%) bottom position and this will at least place it at the bottom of the page.

Problem is that while that worked in FW5 it doesn’t seem to work in FW6 where rests on the bottom of the browser window instead.


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Hey John,

My footers always appear where I put them - which is usually below the page
content. This is why I’m confused about what you’re asking.

If you are building your page as an inline layout, then footers placed
after content containers will always follow them.

If you are creating a layered layout, you can still position an element
relative to another - again, always keeping the footer below the main
content.

In short, what you seem to be asking for has been available for several
versions of Freeway now. What you lack is not a program feature, but an
understanding of how to use the program to achieve the result.

If you do share an example of the difficulty you are having, I would be
happy to look at it and suggest a more specific strategy for your page
construction. Otherwise, you might search the list for discussion on inline
layouts or relative positioning.

Cheers,


Ernie Simpson

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:53 PM, John Cooper email@hidden wrote:

Hi Ernie, right, of course the footer appears at the bottom if I keep
moving it there, so perhaps you are missing something: the word
“automatically”.

For the longest time it’s been a peeve for many that FW can’t devise an
Action that automatically places an item below all content. If there were,
you could apply it to a footer in a Master Page and it would always be
where you want it on every page regardless of page length.

I was wondering whether FW6 had provided that.

Assuming not – I was saying that the work around provided by FW is to
make a footer Fixed in Window with a 0px (or 0%) bottom position and this
will at least place it at the bottom of the page.

Problem is that while that worked in FW5 it doesn’t seem to work in FW6
where rests on the bottom of the browser window instead.


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

John, there is an Action that does just what you want:

http://www.actionsworld.com/Actions/MakeFooter/index.php

I’ve used it for ages. Works great. Now compatible with Freeway 6 too.

–James Wages


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Thanks James, that’s precisely what I mean. It seems a little inconsistent but seems to work, prompting my question why can’t Softpress provide this functionality.

Note to Ernie: sorry if I didn’t make myself clear. The problem is AVOID placing the footer at the end of content. What I’d like (and James’ action seems to do this) is to have a footer on a Master page that appears ‘automatically’ below all content on instance pages regardless of page length.

The point of all this used to be an need to avoid breaking the link between the footer item and the Master when it was moved manually, but this is mitigated now by the ability to use Master content.


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

The underlying issue that causes this problem is that Freeway’s default layout model is Absolute Positioning. This is a very print-esque layout model, predicated on consistent content sizes. This ignores the very nature of Web content, which is browser-rendered and user-preference adjustable. Long story short, if you draw two elements on the page (in normal Freeway defaults, normal design style), they don’t interact in any way. They are like two separate sheets of glass stacked above one another. Content on one sheet can’t push content on another sheet around.

Without that ability to push other content around, your footer cannot know how far down the screen to place itself in order to appear at the bottom of all content. So when you draw a footer on the page, and you pin it to the bottom of the page, that “bottom” is blissfully unaware of anything that appears above it on the screen. The “page” that you define in Freeway is nothing other than a working environment. The actual browser layout will only be the dimensions of the content you place on the screen.

When you use the Fixed in Window positioning, and you pin the element to the bottom of the page with Bottom: 0, then the footer will stick to the bottom of the browser window, regardless of the amount of content and whether or not the page would scroll in the given window size. This is another sort of “sheet of glass” model, where the glass is a storm window attached to your browser. Again, it ignores the content within the page entirely.

Walter

On Feb 5, 2013, at 10:41 AM, John Cooper wrote:

Thanks James, that’s precisely what I mean. It seems a little inconsistent but seems to work, prompting my question why can’t Softpress provide this functionality.

Note to Ernie: sorry if I didn’t make myself clear. The problem is AVOID placing the footer at the end of content. What I’d like (and James’ action seems to do this) is to have a footer on a Master page that appears ‘automatically’ below all content on instance pages regardless of page length.

The point of all this used to be an need to avoid breaking the link between the footer item and the Master when it was moved manually, but this is mitigated now by the ability to use Master content.


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

That’s helpful imagery Walter, but two points:

  1. doesn’t RPL ‘push things around’?

  2. I tested the Fixed in Window positioning, with the element pinned to the bottom of the page with Bottom: 0 – and in FW it sticks to the bottom of the page – but in FW seems to stick to the bottom if the browser window and allows content to scroll "under’ it like freezing rows in a spreadsheet.


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

On Feb 5, 2013, at 11:59 AM, John Cooper wrote:

That’s helpful imagery Walter, but two points:

  1. doesn’t RPL ‘push things around’?

Yes. RPL does a yeoman job of converting an Absolute Positioning layout into a Relative Positioning layout. It’s like a nested “inline” layout without all the work.

  1. I tested the Fixed in Window positioning, with the element pinned to the bottom of the page with Bottom: 0 – and in FW it sticks to the bottom of the page – but in FW seems to stick to the bottom if the browser window and allows content to scroll "under’ it like freezing rows in a spreadsheet.

Yes, that’s what it’s supposed to do. It is not going to do anything but that. You cannot consider the Freeway design view to be the same as a Web browser window – that’s what the Preview mode (or better, Preview in Browser) is for.

Walter


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Sorry, Walter, I didn’t mean in Page mode where I’d expect it to be at the bottom of the window. I meant it still sticks to the bottom of the browser (and not the page) when Preview or Preview in Browser is used. Or am I doing something wrong?


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

No, you’re not doing anything wrong at all. The issue is that if you set the position of an element to be bottom: 0, you have to consider “bottom of what?” to understand what you see. In Freeway 5.5, in a page with all positioned elements, bottom: 0 is going to be bottom of the PageDiv, which is set to height 100% by default. All positioned elements are children of that element, but absolutely positioned elements do not reserve space for themselves within their parent element. So that parent element does not grow or shrink with its children. So what is 100% of in the case of the PageDiv? Well, it’s a direct child of the body tag, and in turn the html tag (mother of all tags). Both of those are set to 100% height also. So what are they in turn 100% of? The window.

So I just went through this in Freeway, and here again in prose, to figure out precisely what you might see. In my case, a 1.390px “tall” page (I say “tall” in scare-quotes because that’s just the amount of workspace reserved in Freeway, nothing in the published code will own up to that value) and an element at the bottom of that page (in Freeway) with its bottom position set to 0 and its top allowed to float, shows me that element pinned to the bottom of the screen, and other elements I positioned further down the page in Freeway floating over it. But unlike the Fixed in Window positioning, where that pinned element remains at the bottom of the screen, in this case the bottom element scrolls up with the rest of the page.

So if you parsed through my tortured explanation in the first paragraph above, you’ll see that while this isn’t what we want, it is entirely predictable. The 0-bottom element is at the bottom of the nearest positioned parent element, which is by default 100% of the height of the browser window. Even though its children stick out of it below the “fold”, those elements are positioned relative to that parent. Since the children do not affect the height of the parent in an absolutely positioned layout, there’s no conflict with the browser’s version of reality. You are getting what you asked for.

Walter

On Feb 5, 2013, at 12:28 PM, John Cooper wrote:

Sorry, Walter, I didn’t mean in Page mode where I’d expect it to be at the bottom of the window. I meant it still sticks to the bottom of the browser (and not the page) when Preview or Preview in Browser is used. Or am I doing something wrong?


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

So to get the footer to be at the bottom of the page in FW6 I should use Absolute positioning: I tested this and it seems to work?


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Yes, but… with Absolute positioning, the size of the contents of elements is not considered in the layout of the page. If you absolutely position something at the bottom of the page, then enable “zoom text only” in your browser, then scale up the text size a few clicks, you will see precisely why that’s a bad thing. Any absolutely positioned element will overflow any other absolutely positioned element, as if neither one was there.

The only truly bulletproof way to place an element at the bottom of the page, and have the content above it on the page shove the footer down when it grows, is to either use RPL or a real inline layout.

Walter

On Feb 5, 2013, at 3:30 PM, John Cooper wrote:

So to get the footer to be at the bottom of the page in FW6 I should use Absolute positioning: I tested this and it seems to work?


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Thank you again Walter.


freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options