Re: CSS forms

Posted by Leon Torres-2 on Jun 23, 2006; 5:25pm
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/CSS-forms-tp168701p168702.html

Hi Al,

I created some pure-css forms with no tables involved for the CRMSFA application
(writeEmail.ftl and viewEmail.ftl).  My experience with that is CSS as currently
implemented isn't suitable for doing this kind of thing.  Column layouts are
still a pain, so css can't be considered a replacement for tables quite yet (see
the Slashdot interview with Hakon today).  You need absolute positioning for it
to work, and floats are just a pita to get right.

But we're thinking about restructuring the DOM of the form html renderer to give
Ajax and CSS people something easier to work with.  This is probably as simple
as giving each table a unique id = form name.  Then you can use CSS selectors to
make your form richer.

- Leon



Al Byers wrote:

> I know there has been discussion about this in the  past, but I can't
> see a clear answer to my questions from them. I see a need for a simple
> ability to create single forms with css styles only. My current need is
> to show a horizontal query bar with drop-downs that send a query to the
> server. In this case I do not want any titles to show. I looked at using
> the position attribute to do this, but the table format screws things
> up. I also want to be able to take advantage of other widget special
> features, such as lookup or dates, without having tables involved.
>
> I was just thinking of creating a new form type, "css", that cycles thru
> the fields and does not do anything with tables and ignores the title if
> it is empty.
>
> Is this too simplistic? A bad idea? Won't be difficult to put together.
>
> -Al
>