World: r3wp

From Dario Giacomelli
Registered on the R3 chat as Dario

wow, interesting

http://it.linkedin.com/in/ingdariogiacomelli

anyone game to test it out?

Many of the concepts are a lot like how I started the first phase 
of my CMS three years ago, but the implementation is a bit different

Is anyone here familiar with the current state of WYSIWYG web designers? 
Are there any decent current free ones? I'm only familiar with Kompozer 
(the new Nvu) and have heard good things about WebMatrix. This is 
for a person familiar with Frontpage, but I'm trying to disuade them 
from using it (for all our sakes), and don't want to encourage piracy 
of Dreamweaver or Expression Web.

I haven't used Nvu or Kompozer for years, and only use code editors 
for my web work (or don't do web front end stuff at all).

There's been a lull in KompoZer development, but it's reasonable 
now

It still has a lot of quirks, though

Are there any decent alternatives to it?

Sadly, no

Would using any modern word processor then saving as HTML be any 
worse than Frontpage? ;) I wouldn't do a complex site this way, but 
for a couple of static pages it may suffice.

Just don't use Frontpage. If you end up having to edit the pages 
later by hand, it's faster simply to build them by hand.

If Frontpage is the alternative, WebMatrix looks a lot better. However, 
it's focused on developers and complex backends. If the goal is simple 
web pages for a common user, KompoZer is probably better, and more 
in the ballpark of Frontpage

I just remembered that there's a successor to KompoZer:

http://bluegriffon.org

It seems to be usable by now, but I have no experience with it

It's HTML5/CSS3 support looks good.

If you are on OSX take a look at Rapidweaver. Really good.

Ashley didn't you have some web dialect you were doing?

Yes, I'm using it to generate web sites for clients ... but I want 
to add support for mobile devices (via jQuery Mobile) and solve the 
"one website for desktops, another for mobiles" problem (via "Responsive 
Web Design" techniques - see http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design

That's scary if true .. mobile browsing expected to outpace desktop 
access in 3-5 years.

Steve Jobs made a good point in an interview not long ago: "PC's 
are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this 
is going to make some people uneasy."

why do you find it scary, Graham?

it means we will have to recode all our websites!

Exactly, and there's the opportunity as most people (and tools) are 
still stuck with a "mywebsite.com for desktops and mywebsite.com/m 
for mobiles" model.

I'm hoping that whatever framework I use will automatically adapt 
:)

Or that mobile browsers will just cope

designing for a small browser still requires re-designing the layout. 
 no way round that.

I'm not sure that there will be a distinction between mobile browsing 
and desktop browsing for too much longer (no longer than a decade, 
IMO). Just a few more tech advances in battery life will allow for 
practical pico projectors to be included into any mobile device. 
An alternative that increases viewable area is foldable displays 
- they exist already in prototype form - just need to be commercialized. 
HUDs and retinal displays are others. These are not sci-fi anymore. 
But if you're just talking about the next couple of years or so, 
I agree.

Between prototype and cheap commercialization, it can be decades.

I remember having seen large flat screen TV proto in the early 80's 
(plasma).
We had to wait until 2005+ to be able to buy them at low prices.

yeah the first not crappy plasma screens where 60000$  and they didn't 
come down for a long time.

It is a long time I last looked into ajax libraries.  I know I tend 
not to use mainstream stuff, but often based upon coolness of the 
technology :-) Many ppl talk jquery, even MS is adopting it for SharePoint, 
but what about e.g.:

Mootools
YUI - http://yuilibrary.com/
Dojo Toolkit - http://dojotoolkit.org/
Sencha Touch - http://www.sencha.com/
DHTMLx - http://dhtmlx.com/
Prototype - http://www.prototypejs.org/

SmartGWT (successor to GWT) - http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#main
http://dojotoolkit.org/

Any experience, preference? What are YOU using?

I'm still using JQuery .. but it's a hard slog.  But I might switch 
to using Enyo if it's as good as it looks

and of course it has to be released

I'm using jQuery, becuase I'm lazy to write own stuff (which I consider 
better in most cases, because I usually need only minimal functionality 
provided by the jQuery) and want to spend as less time working on 
web as possible so I do not examine other frameworks.

AFAIK, everyone here is using JQuery, or, have written their own 
frameworks

I still also maintain another site in YUI

but checking your links, I quite like Dojo

I can imagine REBOL dialect to build code for many such a toolkits, 
but as I say.. I don't want to spend time on it at this moment.

I think dockimbel is also JQuery

user

I used dojo a litle a whwile ago, I found the event handling very 
clean. I've read that dojo is stronger for single page apps that 
many of the other frameworks.

We use Quilt for Qtask, custom written of course.

I've also heard good comments about dojo.  it looks better architectured 
overall, but that is just an impression.

I recently used Kompozer to build a quick site to fix a friend's 
site that was so bad I figured I could at least spend a few hours 
and take it from a 1 to a 6 (scale one to ten).

There are a few variations of Kompozer.  But Kompozer is the best 
of them.


It still sucks though.  When you do view source it does not put your 
cursor where you expect it to.  It is nightmarish to figure out how 
to edit tables. 
But, over all, if you keep things simple, it works well enough.

mobile browsing expected to outpace desktop access in 3-5 years.

Most of the world lives on their cell phones.


As to JavaScript Frameworks to fix the biggest human fail in computer 
history (that being that we use HTML+JavaScript to build UserInterface), 
having headed the creation of a complete UI system that is delivered 
through the web, I will say the following:


- Find something that handles Tables (grids, lists) well.  Make sure 
it does verything you need.

- Make a list for yourself of widgets you care about, and confirm 
(assume nothing) about the level of detail with which they operate. 
 For example, Imagine 3 radio buttons, on the web they have no default 
state, and some interfaces allow them to operate like checkboxes, 
not radio buttons.  Again, assume nothing!

- Confirm, for yourself, they work on the platforms you care about. 
 Nothing works on everything, even when they claim it.


I did not want to build Quilt, but we still don't know anything that 
comes close other than Tibco's crap, and I'm not sure they even sell 
it anymore. (I recall it was like $100K).

I must correct myself.. I don't want to write my own JS stuff anymore... 
I just found that one old script (simple menu running on the site 
many years) stopped working in IE8. I don't want to deal with browser's 
(un)compatibilities anymore.. better to use an obscure framework 
or don't use JS at all.

a good resource I found to start using HTML 5 and help make those 
pages work somewhat backwards compatible on non html5 browsers.

http://diveintohtml5.org/

I haven't finished reading, but so far I like it.   I like the writing 
style.

it has a nice retrospect of HTML and tackles a single question... 
"why do we have an <IMG> tag in html?"... the answer is surprisingly 
simple and evocative:
The ones that win are the ones that ship.

funny... the leading OS is called WINdows   ;-)

about JS libs:

I don't use jQuery .. it's oweblown for what I want (I don't need 
it to reinvent javascript). If I need any complex components like 
datepicker (which I don't want to reinvent) I use mootools usually 
(because you can use just needed parts of it). jQuery UI modules 
(which has this) are very very slow and CSS is so complex I don't 
even start to get it how to customize it.


Dojo always seemed this mega lib that I don't want either. If I go 
to their demos (at least last time I looked) everything is slow and 
unresponsive. I want my things to be slim on code and snappy.


Prototype (mootools does this also, but I think a little less) is 
first generation JS lib (that started it all). I think it heavily 
monkey patches the core JS/DOM objects.. thats why I don't like it.


I also neve use css3 selectors in my JS code (that is a major part 
why people use jquery and likes). I always move relative to an element 
with seekFwd, seekIn, seekOut, seekBack fuctions I have or just use 
ID of element (and then seek if needed).