Tabula Rasa
Mar. 7th, 2012 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carene_watermanSaves this one for last.
Tabula Rasa is the only layout I'd ever theme. And yet no one does it, and the few that are there are just colour themes.
On the other hand, TR is the base of most of the other layouts, so it gets used. I've come to understand how this happened.
From my perspective a style has three parts:
1. The layout, which is where things are positioned and the core typography.
2. The skin, or the design or whatever you want to call the borders and backgrounds, the box-shadows and font effects, the position refinements--like the icon biting into the corner of an entry, etc.
3. The colour scheme and the background images.
Now, there's overlap between those--what's padding is it layout or skin? And what's skin, does it include the number of different colours and where they're used, or is that colour scheme?
But for me, 2 and 3 are what a theme is and 1 is the layout. But, what's happened as styles got developed is that 1 and 2 are the layout and usually the theme is only 3.
And there's technical reasons for this--if you want to have a border, you have to have the property set in the layout layer, and so on. But, Tabula Rasa has all that flexibility, and it's a natural for CSS only designers to go to town on, and they haven't done that. The CSS only people don't seem to ever want to step out of private styles.
Maybe DW should just accept that and set up a different way for CSS only styles to get made public. Set up a static site with live previews. Something. Paging through a couple of comms of code that's never been vetted seems like a lot of work.
Tabula Rasa is the only layout I'd ever theme. And yet no one does it, and the few that are there are just colour themes.
On the other hand, TR is the base of most of the other layouts, so it gets used. I've come to understand how this happened.
From my perspective a style has three parts:
1. The layout, which is where things are positioned and the core typography.
2. The skin, or the design or whatever you want to call the borders and backgrounds, the box-shadows and font effects, the position refinements--like the icon biting into the corner of an entry, etc.
3. The colour scheme and the background images.
Now, there's overlap between those--what's padding is it layout or skin? And what's skin, does it include the number of different colours and where they're used, or is that colour scheme?
But for me, 2 and 3 are what a theme is and 1 is the layout. But, what's happened as styles got developed is that 1 and 2 are the layout and usually the theme is only 3.
And there's technical reasons for this--if you want to have a border, you have to have the property set in the layout layer, and so on. But, Tabula Rasa has all that flexibility, and it's a natural for CSS only designers to go to town on, and they haven't done that. The CSS only people don't seem to ever want to step out of private styles.
Maybe DW should just accept that and set up a different way for CSS only styles to get made public. Set up a static site with live previews. Something. Paging through a couple of comms of code that's never been vetted seems like a lot of work.
