Re: [Straw-devel] item view

[Juri Pakaste]

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 01:07 +0200, Lars Lindner wrote:
> Am Mi, den 16.06.2004 schrieb Juri Pakaste um 22:02:
> > I tried to modify the item view look a bit; I was trying to get
> > something resembling Evolution (1.5): not the grey border, but the way
> > the headers look. Bold text field name, justified to right, normal
> > weight field value. Same font size as body text. The current head block
> > looks way too heavy to me.
> > 
> > I got totally frustrated with gtkhtml2's CSS support and fighting with
> > HTML. Anyone want to give it a shot?
> 
> Hmmm CSS in GtkHTML2 works pretty well for Liferea :-)

Yeah, Straw too, up to this point. I guess it's unfair comparing it to
Gecko, but the fact is, there's a huge gap that's getting wider every
day. I hope using Gecko will be a realistic option some day soon; who
knows, maybe it already is. Marco was apparently pretty busy working on
it at least at some point, judging from his blog. Of course, there's
also the question of the Python bindings, but I suppose we could ship
them with Straw if necessary.

Although I'd like to stick to gtkhtml2 at least until you get more
native-looking scrollbars with Gecko.

> The only trap I found till today is that it does not support all
> characters in style definition names and tables take not all style
> attributes. What are your problems?

Not all characters in style definition names? You mean CSS classnames
are restricted in what characters they may contain? I wonder if that was
my problem, although I'd assume it could handle an underscore. Basically
td's weren't coping with any style definitions I threw at them; text-
align and font-weight were too difficult for it. Of course, you don't
have to everything with CSS here, we could just hardcode the HTML,
although that would make it more difficult to add customizability for
the look later on if we felt like it. 

Another difficulty was with the whole header frame: at the moment, it
uses a div, which works fine. However, putting a table inside the div
you get too much space between the top of the div and the first row of
the table. And I was unable to make just the plain table look decent,
but maybe it would have been possible with a little more effort; when I
tried it, I got a gap between the gray area and the black border. It was
as if the background color didn't apply to the padding.

So, again, if anyone feels like it, I wouldn't mind receiving a patch
for the css and/or the html. To restate the goal in bit clearer terms:

1) the grey box as it is
2) add field names (Title: and Date:, or the localized equivalents -
btw, does anyone know if it's reasonable to not include the colon in the
localizable string? I think it has to be there, I suppose that for
example the chinese have some other way of expressing the relationship
between the label and the content...), make them look like in Evolution
1.5: bold, right-justified, make them line up. Same font size as the
body text.
3) make the field contents the same font size as the body text, normal
weight. Left-justified.

I got everything else working ok, by putting a table inside the div and
using the old-style HTML attribute for td align and a b element for
making the text bold, except that I got the huge gap between the Title
line and the top of the grey box. And as I said, having more of the
layout stuff in the CSS file would be better.

I suppose we could always use Gtk+ labels for the header stuff, if we
moved to a more Evolution-style look, though. But I think we should be
able to use the HTML widget for them.

> BTW Straw is a interesting aggregator and a good to modeled on.
> 
> Keep innovating!

Thanks, will try :-)
-- 
[ Juri Pakaste | address@hidden | http://www.iki.fi/juri/ ]

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