Wedge

You've never seen a naked woman before have you? :P

Yes, that's the whole point of the macro system... ;)
Okay then, I'll stick to the original plan I guess. The only change I'll be doing is using the direction:rtl hack to help keep the sidebar HTML after the content HTML.
My only worry was about the fact that themers may find it a bit hard to understand. But OTOH that's really not the kind of place they want to mess with in their first attempts. Also, I could 'simply' get rid of the index template's macro definitions and move them over to Weaving's skin.xml but it would probably make the parsing a bit slower. (Until I decide to cache these...)

Oh... I was in the process of reverting my changes, and completely forgot to say -- the main reason why I wanted to get rid of the table tags for IE6 is that the sidebar can't be moved to the bottom...! Best I can do is to just hide the sidebar, but not move it below... Which is a bit of a bummer. And that's why I tried looking for an alternative that would work.

Bumpidibump..?

Troll :P
What's wrong with display:table...?

These days I've been going through the skin files and trying to simplify some stuff. To little avail, though... It's still kind of messy.
Still, I've been thinking about the sidebar system (cf. my talk with Emanuele), and was reminded of two things:
- the macro system is really powerful and great,
- it's totally going to confuse themers.

Well, to be honest with my greatness, it's not that hard to understand: <we:sidebar> holds the sidebar code, <we:offside> has the main content, etc... And 'sidebar' is defined in the index template, as well as in <skeleton> tags in sub-skins. So far, so good.

Now, I've always considered Weaving to be a skin that really, really should require as little 'hacking' as possible.
In Wedge, by default, the sidebar has two different codebases:
- IE6/IE7 use a table-based layout (<table> tags)
- Other browsers use table emulation (<div> tags with display:table on them)

It's okay because it explains how flexible the system is.
Now, if we delve into sub-skins, the skeleton is modified. When it comes to Warm, it's okay that it's modified because the sidebar position really is quite removed from the original layout. It's a great example of what you can do with careful planning.
But in Wine, the skeleton is modified so that the sidebar can be shown on the LEFT of the screen instead of the right. It's just an example, of course -- but it's still completely silly to change the HTML for what can be done in CSS.

Well, in my defense, back then I didn't know that table cells could be swapped with CSS. I learned about that some time ago, that you just need to apply 'direction: rtl' to the parent display: table, and 'direction: ltr' to its children. And it works perfectly. Despite it being a 'dirty hack', it's still extremely simple to apply and even to understand -- and it has the added benefit of leaving the sidebar contents where it belongs, i.e. at the end of the HTML source. (Heck, I'm even considering pushing the menu into a display:table of its own, and using display:table-header-group to move it to the top regardless of its position in the source...)

Okay, so far so good. I'm definitely doing that. I only need to redefine the skeleton once (in Warm), and Wine is left alone. Consider it an 'announcement' of a change I'll commit soon. What matters right now is IE 6/7.

Now, when it comes to them, doing table-based layout is cooler in my opinion, but a more realistic way of handling them would be to instead use the negative margin hack to show the sidebar correctly. i.e., by putting a negative right margin on the main contents and a positive right margin that compensates for it right in the first nested div, I can easily put a right-floated sidebar on the right. It's a proven method, and has no drawbacks -- except that it's not a proper 'column' that shows up, instead just a floated sidebar, meaning that if you set a background color on the sidebar, it only extends as far as the sidebar contents will extends, rather than filling the entire sidebar.
It's a well known problem.
It can also be fixed by using faux columns or other alternative tweaks for IE that are also well documented. But it just adds to the bloat and limits extensibility.

So... Here's my question, basically (and as TL:DR).

When it comes to IE6/IE7 compatibility, what would you prefer to have by default in the skins provided in Wedge?

1/ What exists right now, i.e. the <div>s are replaced on-the-fly to simple <table> tags for IE6/7 only?
2/ A simple CSS float hack that positions the sidebar <div> correctly but doesn't extend the sidebar to the full height?
3/ A complicated CSS hack that positions the sidebar <div> correctly and extends the sidebar just like (1) would do?
4/ Like (3), but applied to all browsers, instead of using the more logical 'display: table' setting? (<-- don't bother, that one's just troll bait :P)

As a reminder - none of these change anything for non-IE browsers. They will *always* use <div> tags. Also, I'm still considering the possibility of allowing for the sidebar to be removed (possibly to be replaced by a single-line fallback for mini-links like the time of day and Unread posts/replies.)

So... Please start discussing :)

nb is a special tag not parsed the same way. Maybe that's the reason.
Although really, I dunno. This code is rocket science. It's hard to make it simpler, even though I wrote it...

Just as a note... This is where the last membergroup discussion took place.
There's also an older contact list discussion that was never finished, here:
http://wedge.org/pub/feats/7038/privacy-options/msg274932/#msg274932

Pete, can you look into the last few posts of these and sum them up for me?[1] You're a better reader than I am, and I tend to get tired too quick when I delve into long posts ;)

1.	Basically: what we determined to be best, contact lists or membergroups, and whether or not this would have an impact on performance etc... So, really, is it realistic to have contact lists or not.

I'd glad to see you back at work, Pete :)
I hope it's not because of the couple of sour remarks I made the last few days... Otherwise it's going to encourage me to be even more cynical :lol:Sarah Connor,This is the first time I'm in that situation, myself. My first piece of software, I was obviously a total unknown, and I released new versions every other month or so, so people were never calling it vaporware... Aeva Media, when I did the renaming etc, I think it took about six months between the last SMG and the first AeMe, maybe less, anyway everything was cool too.
Wedge... Not so much.
But then again, it's two years. Well, technically, a bit over a year since we made the announcement. And nearly a year since my first tentative release date... Eh. That's pretty much an extra life I lost in this. A year in the merde.Your signature's? Well, your forum seems to be running phpBB, that's funny ;) (Although it's a theme I never saw before..!)
What's the software about?HTML and CSS is enough to help! Submitting improvements to my CSS, etc... Unfortunately I'm way too busy in so many areas, I just can't keep up with the 'clean' CSS, and I tend to add bloat too easily.I'm not discouraged, personally... I'll never be. I enjoy making Wedge too much. Of course, it's also due to the fact that every time I stumble upon something I don't like, I'll push it aside and focus on Wess or something else instead... :^^;:With the team obviously, more than with the software itself. (Otherwise we would have forked some other software...)
We wanted to keep contributing to it, but without the extra hassle.

It's 'nearly' too bad that the team problems are now largely solved and some good devs are at work on SMF 2.1 and we're basically going to clash with it when it'd be best to merge them or something ;)We have 220 likes for Wedge on Facebook... I don't call that a cult following. It's not even a tenth of SMF's likes...
I don't expect Wedge to be a smash hit, really. I've known what a smash hit is -- back in 1998. By 2001 my software had been downloaded in the hundreds of thousands. (Millions?) Thankfully, I'm not desperate to reproduce that here... First because it's even more of a niche, and secondly because I'm not planning to make money off Wedge, ah ah... (Stupid me.)It's so much more complicated than that, unfortunately... :(