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 Extraneous HTML being added

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DonB
Posted: 11/29/2007, 5:40 AM

With the arrival of CCS 3.2, we also got a multitude of large and small
issues with the HTML handling. This is one of them:

January of 2007 support case -


"For some reason, there is a <br> tag being inserted into Includes (at the
very bottom of the template page). This is very frustration, as I have to
watch these to be sure they don't appear and throw off the page layout -
adding unintended whitespace. "



It took until today (almost December!), but the case was replied-to,
'resolved' after 10 months of 'working on it' by the developers. The
resolution was:



"I'm sorry, but the requested modification was declined. Developers believe
that is quite reasonable to insert <br > tag after the form.
Thank you for understanding."


I wish those developers would begin fixing the HTML issues. I am greatly
annoyed that CCS continues living in the stone ages with respect to page
layout. It was bad enough that the 'improved' Style feature bloated the
HTML template with two tables (one for the heading, another for the data) in
all grids and records.

I've already submitted several other issues with the HTML editor handling,
all of which are dismissed as 'by design' or otherwise discarded as 'not a
problem.' And this, a completely unnecessary and superfluous <BR> tag
appended to the end of Components that CCS builds. The only rationale I can
see is that this is for adding white space between the Control and whatever
gets put below it.

The problem with this is, CCS is making decisions about where things are
positioned, and not ME. If I want something to have space below it, I'll
put it there. I'll handle it by doing the proper thing and define a
bottom-margin for it in the stylesheet.

From it's inception, the developers of CCS seemingly have had almost no clue
about proper utilization of Cascading Style Sheets. The result is that we
get HTML that is several times bigger (bloated) than it needs to be. It's
not uncommon for me to reduce the size of a page by 50% just by removing all
the table-within-table nonsense. And the stylesheets are far more
complicate than they need to be, too. It a real guessing sometimes when you
just want a font size to change here or there or you want a color slightly
changed. You have to make dozens of edits because the size/color specifiers
repeat throughout the style sheet. I've said it before, there's a reason
it's called CASCADING STYLE sheets. It's not necessary to define a color in
20 different places when the nature of CSS is to let the attributes be
inherited and prioritized ("cascaded") throughout the markup on a page.

This further deteriorates when Includes are used as this results in <LINK>
elements being peppered throughout the container page. Nevermind that these
are only properly declared in the header, it's bad enough that it
complicates and confuses the way style sheets are processed and styling is
applied by browsers. There should be NO 'header only' tags (LINK or META)
added to the BODY, but you do it anyway. These are put into Includes so
that the design panel accurately displays the content. These need to be
removed when the page is published, or moved to the <HEAD> section.

Just because you do a really good job of making life easier for me with
respect to the coding involved, it doesn't excuse you from doing a proper
job of laying out the HTML. I wish you'd figure that out one of these days.

--
DonB

http://ccswiki.gotodon.net


datadoit
Posted: 11/29/2007, 6:23 AM

Agreed!

While CCS is an enormous time-saver, it is sometimes offset by reversing
some of it's "little helpers".

Perhaps these could be settings controlled by the customer under
Tools->Options->HTML Formatting. Seems like a reasonable compromise.
JimmyCrackedCorn

Posts: 583
Posted: 11/29/2007, 2:50 PM

I'll start by saying CCS is saving me a lot of time and work and for that I am thrilled! But Don makes a very good point. I'd like to hear from Yes that improving the generated HTML (use of CSS, etc.) is somewhere on the product roadmap.
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