While I appreciate Justin including my recent
XHTML compliance and code formatting work in his summary of
the improvements made in the *first* Dada Mail 2.10 alpha release, ...honestly,
who cares? It's not like the fact I closed a few open tags and made sure things
are well-nested is going to make a whit of difference to you or to any other
end-users.
Until now, that is. :-)
Following the general concept and spirit of a
very customization-friendly XHTML page that my neighbour Dave* made for
a little site he calls the CSS Zen Garden ( http://csszengarden.com/ ), the
upcoming release of Dada Mail 2.10 alpha 2 will have a full
complement of added CSS "hooks" that group -- and that will allow you to better
control -- the content of the program's various default pages in both
structurally and semantically meaningful ways.
Prior to this, only the most obvious aesthetic
changes were possible by tweaking Dada Mail's CSS file alone: adjusting the
colors and fonts, for instance, or perhaps more boldly, moving the control panel
menu from the left to the right side of the page. For much else, you almost
certainly had to start changing -- at minimum -- the default list
template or default admin template (and in some cases, other, somewhat more
obscure template files as well).
But now, the more you know about CSS, the more
you can customize the look and feel of your Dada Mail installation simply by
changing only one file: your external stylesheet. Want to hide the breadcrumbs?
Replace the header title with an accessibility-friendly GIF, JPEG or PNG image
replacement? Show your archived messages inline...but *only* until they reach
beyond a certain height, after which point they'll switch automatically to an
iframe-like scrollbar window? Now you can do all three...without touching a
single template.
So why am I posting all this to the dev list?
Because I may have fibbed on the "full
complement" thing.
I mean, I *think* I've done a pretty thorough job
here, but I could certainly benefit from a few extra pairs of eyes and a few
better brains than mine, to suggest areas or types of CSS markup control I
hadn't even considered, or to improve on what I've done so far.
If you have the time to take a quick browse
through the markup summaries I've included below -- or if you could simply
keep this stuff in mind during your alpha and beta testing -- I'd welcome
any and all thoughts you have about possible "Zen Gardening" of Dada Mail that I
may have overlooked. And if you think it's too minor, suggest it anyways! If
only 3% of the program's end-users might use it, I'll probably put it
in anyway, because the few extra bytes of bandwidth (literally) will be
completely insignificant to the other 97%.
I'd like to get this template/CSS work as robust
as possible as soon as possible, ...because as I've mentioned in past
posts, I'm very lazy -- and if I'm going to customize the look and feel of
*my* installations of the program, I want those customizations to last through
as many version upgrades as they can. :-)
So...thanks! I look forward to your
thoughts,
- Shane
* Note: Not my actual neighbour. Except in the Canadian
sense.
------------------------
Dada Mail 2.10 alpha 2: added structural
markup for CSS control
Stripping down the new markup to just a little
*beyond* its bare essentials, here are the basic layout structures of Dada Mail
2.10 alpha 2's main page types. The new CSS "hooks" I've added to these page
types are shown with pluses (and in color for HTML-email
recipients).
The main list
pages:
<body>
+ <div
id="PageWrapper">
<div
id="Header">
+ <span id="Logo"></span>
<span
id="Title"></span>
+ <div class="spacer"></div>
</div>
<div
id="Content">
+ <div id="Breadcrumbs"></div>
(other page
content)
</div>
+ </div>
</body>
The control panel (admin)
pages:
<body>
+ <div
id="AdminPageWrapper">
<div
id="Header">
+ <span id="Logo"></span>
<span
id="Title"></span>
+ <div class="spacer"></div>
</div>
+ <div
id="AdminContentWrapper">
<div
id="AdminContent">
(all admin
content)
</div>
+ </div>
+ <div
id="MenuContentWrapper">
<div
id="MenuContent">
(all menu
content)
</div>
+ </div>
+ </div>
</body>
The archive pages:
<body>
+ <div
id="PageWrapper">
<div
id="Header">
+ <span id="Logo"></span>
<span
id="Title"></span>
+ <div class="spacer"></div>
</div>
<div
id="Content">
+ <div id="Breadcrumbs"></div>
+ <div id="archived_message_wrapper">
+ <div
id="archived_message_head"></div>
+ <div
id="archived_message_body"></div>
+
</div>
+ <div
id="archived_attachments_wrapper"></div>
(all other
archive content)
</div>
+ </div>
</body>
(Note: If "Show HTML Messages in an iFrame" is
selected in the advanced archive options screen, <iframe
id="archived_message_body_container"> will be used in place of <div
id="archived_message_body"> above.)
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