Kevin, nobody official has said that Actions were off the table. I think what people have been talking about here are basic improvements to the ergonomics of the style interface. In the current interface, there are two basic problems that I can see:
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The names of attributes are subtly (or in some cases, not so subtly) different from their actual CSS names. Part of this is the heritage of Freeway, as a child of desktop publishing, it follows the typesetting names for things (leading vs line-spacing) in preference to the CSS names. This is great if you are not trying to follow along with an example you found on the Web, because you can use your DTP experience directly on the Web. But if you are trying to emulate something that was written using the actual CSS names for things, then you have to maintain a mapping in your head from CSS-speak to Designer-speak.
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There’s a massive learning cliff between the easy-mode pickers and values in the Edit Style dialog and the Extended attributes, where you can do EVERYTHING ELSE. One of the things that CSSEdit got absolutely correct in its interface was that you could use the easy-mode pickers to change things (and you would always be restricted to only the legal values), but as you made those changes, the actual CSS would be updated in the middle pane, and you could learn (slowly at first) what these changes looked like in actual style sheets. The training wheels were there to actually train you in the language of Web styling. And if you were a CSS ninja, you could simply type your code in the middle pane, and you would get exactly what you wanted. (And the pickers of the easy-mode interface would update to match whatever you typed.
Extended (in all its many implementations in Freeway) is the secret sauce that allowed people like me, with a penchant for learning how things actually work under the hood, stay within Freeway for far longer than otherwise reasonable. Being able to do real visual design, but then go deep under the hood with tweezers kept it interesting and viable for me as the scope of my work moved radically into database-driven design and application programming.
Not everyone needs that, but the way that the current Freeway interface goes from hands-off to do-whatever-you-like misses an opportunity to teach you something about how the Web works. I came to this party at the beginning (and I brought ice), when the culture of browsers and the pages and applications that ran in them was much more DIY. View Source was a top-level menu item in every browser. I learned a whole lot about how Freeway worked by using it to design a page, then viewing the source in a browser (or a programmer’s text editor). I could change things visually and see what the difference was in the generated HTML. This served me well when I started learning how to use all the various Markup and Extended interfaces to inject my own code into the visual page. I was highly motivated to learn this, and the way that the interface was structured made it more difficult than it could have been. Given the one-way nature of how Freeway worked and works, this is not entirely surprising. I’ll be excited to see what Jeremy can accomplish once freed from the strictures of 20+ year-old programming practices.
Walter
On Mar 5, 2019, at 5:57 AM, Kevin McElligott email@hidden wrote:
Richard
“but you will have to write styles/stylesheets and apply those to your document. In fact, even blend modes are possible, mixing multiple images and create a mask from images. But it’s all on css and your experience level on Freeway.”What I miss (being more a graphic designer than web developer) is the Actions that were usable in the previous versions of Freeway. Would it be possible to develop a library of CSS style sheets that could be copied and pasted as a substitute for the lost Actions (and possibly much more)?
Kevin
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