[Pro] Master Pages, Inline Design, and FWP 6?

I’m curious to see how many FWP 6 inline website designers are using Master Pages. I was using Masters, but after my Masters kept deleting my actions I’m wondering if it’s more of a pain than it’s worth.


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I am not using them at this point. I’d love to, but I still need to revisit
my main complaint about the extra class styles they generate… but I’ve been
too busy to do that yet. However, it’s still on my mind.


Ernie Simpson

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:16 PM, RavenManiac email@hiddenwrote:

I’m curious to see how many FWP 6 inline website designers are using
Master Pages. I was using Masters, but after my Masters kept deleting my
actions I’m wondering if it’s more of a pain than it’s worth.


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So is using Master Pages what’s adding a CSS to every page in the website?


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No, what Freeway Pro 6 does is put structural styles - the styles from the
divs and structures on a page - into a css file for that page. Open one of
those “page” css files and you will see what I am talking about.

They also seem to include non-master items - items on your page that either
aren’t on your master or have been “changed” from their master counterpart.


Ernie Simpson

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 9:08 AM, RavenManiac email@hidden wrote:

So is using Master Pages what’s adding a CSS to every page in the website?


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So basically someone at Softpress decided to go CSS crazy with FWP 6?


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No, what they did was make a pragmatic decision about what they could do to move the inline CSS (itself an artifact of how Freeway generates its positioning information about the page, and still rooted firmly in the layout model from the late 90s, with clear-pixel shims everywhere) into an external stylesheet. Because Freeway encourages you to draw what you want to see, without regard for structural or semantic nesting of elements, the kind of positioning information they have available to work with is fairly limited.

Throw Master Pages into the mix, and you have something that would take a fair amount of serious re-learning on the part of the user base to un-twist. I’m not saying this is unwanted or unneeded, but it would have been a revolution, rather than an evolution, and likely would have delayed the release by a year or more.

Ernie and I can look at a page of code and see the structure behind it. We can look at a layout and propose strategies to arrange the HTML and CSS the same way we would organize an outline of a novel, too. When you start with what amounts to a picture of the page, and aren’t even remotely human, which is the set of blocks that Freeway starts in, you have to rely on other cues to get the same results. There are ways to take what Freeway generates and force them into single CSS files, but I doubt the result would be nice to look at in any sense of the word. (I’m thinking here of uglify.js, the Node script that Rails uses to concatenate and minify the stylesheets for its applications. See what you make of this bit of loveliness: http://ec2-107-22-153-45.compute-1.amazonaws.com/assets/application-16e43968dbd38efb0f6b64596436852a.css )

Walter

On Apr 26, 2013, at 4:31 PM, RavenManiac wrote:

So basically someone at Softpress decided to go CSS crazy with FWP 6?


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No, not all. These page stylesheets are how they externalized the inline
css styles. In fact, it’s the same approach I had come to use with 5.5
using a combination of actions by Tim and Walter.

I don’t think css must obsessively be reduced to a single stylesheet - in
fact, I support that css code should be able to occupy every position
allowed… that’s part of what makes it so flexible. What I aim for, I
suppose, would be called a sensible css strategy - just the right thing in
the right place, respecting both logic and the cascade order.


Ernie Simpson

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 4:31 PM, RavenManiac email@hidden wrote:

So basically someone at Softpress decided to go CSS crazy with FWP 6?


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