Just before I reply to Nick, I'd like to thank the people who have so far
replied. I'm actually surprised at the amount of responses I've gotten,
especially considering the useless description I gave. This is what has put
me off doing this before -- I'm a perfectionist, and I always have
difficulty tackling the description of /my own/ projects and ideas, because
of the level of complication in my own head (it's a scary place). Anyway,
much appreciated folks.
> It's tempting to stick with IE because it's so widely used, but that urge
> should be resisted :) Targeting mozilla is fine, and you could do cool
> stuff like customizing the UI.
>Indeed, and that would be one of the goals of the project, although
obviously in the long term. Of course, you can do this in IE too, but when
you get into advanced client-side functionality, which I would very much
like to do, you really have to settle on one or the other. I would like to
settle on Mozilla, and I'll explain why in my response to Lee.
That said, the /immediate/ goal would be to get the framework and a core set
of modules built. Really good client-side functionality guys are hard to
come by, because there's no middle ground with these guys. You're either a
guru or a copy-and-paster, and ne'er the twain shall meet. Server-side is a
bit easier, because there is such a /huge/ middle ground. Even beginners
would be able to contribute to this, with simple functions that can be built
into Phactory methods. And they stand to learn from it too.
> The problems start to appear when you try to use this stuff to
> automatically generate cross-browser HTML. Even if you assume
> that anyone viewing a Phactory based website will use IE6 or
> Mozilla, there are enough differences between these "standards
> compliant" browsers to mess things up, especially with fiddly
> layouts or when you start letting people upload stuff from
> dreamweaver (yuck).
>I'm glad you mention that, and this is the reason I wanted people to ask
questions, and ultimately why I want to set up a sort of group to discuss
this. To address your comment, these problems won't occur for the simple
reason that I /don't care/ about the generated and delivered frontend, only
the backend. The backend management console will certainly deliver
browser-specific HTML, but the frontend is up to the web designer, using the
templating system. If the generated HTML is cruddy, it's up to the designer
to go in and fix it.
adam
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