RT CSS Overhaul (ATTENTION W3M AND IE USERS)

RT Developers
1

A couple days ago, Oliver Thomas at MIT sent me a couple of patches to
RT 3.3’s menuing system to move the CSS styles out of the html and into
a style sheet where they belonged. This got me poking at RT’s layout
engine again. I’ve spent the past 12 hours overhauling RT 3.3’s layout
engine to be almost completely driven by cascading stylesheets, instead
of the table-based box model we used to use.

I’ve set up rt3.fsck.com (login as guest with a password of guest) as a
demo of the new CSS layout. It’s not 100% done yet, but at this point,
I think it may be at least as good as the old layout.

I’d like to hear back from folks who aren’t using Gecko or kHTML based
browsers about the usability of the new layout, compared to the old
layout.

Jesse

2

[Jesse Vincent]

I’d like to hear back from folks who aren’t using Gecko or kHTML based
browsers about the usability of the new layout, compared to the old
layout.

It looks quite good in Opera 6.12, with one small exception. The menu
on the left side use a very small font, making it hard to read.

3

Jesse, overall I like it better (using IE on XP with all fixes), but I
noticed that no matter how big the browser window is, the data is always
wider than the window. With a full screen IE window on a 1400x1050
display, I still have both scroll bars and have to scroll to the right
to see all the data.

Kelly F. Hickel
Senior Software Architect
MQSoftware, Inc
952.345.8677
kfh@mqsoftware.com

-----Original Message-----
From: rt-devel-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com [mailto:rt-devel-
bounces@lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of Jesse Vincent
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2004 3:16 AM
To: RT Development List
Subject: [Rt-devel] RT CSS Overhaul (ATTENTION W3M AND IE USERS)

A couple days ago, Oliver Thomas at MIT sent me a couple of patches to
RT 3.3’s menuing system to move the CSS styles out of the html and
into
a style sheet where they belonged. This got me poking at RT’s layout
engine again. I’ve spent the past 12 hours overhauling RT 3.3’s layout
engine to be almost completely driven by cascading stylesheets,
instead
of the table-based box model we used to use.

I’ve set up rt3.fsck.com (login as guest with a password of guest) as
a
demo of the new CSS layout. It’s not 100% done yet, but at this
point,

4
  • Jesse Vincent:

I’ve set up rt3.fsck.com (login as guest with a password of guest) as a
demo of the new CSS layout. It’s not 100% done yet, but at this point,
I think it may be at least as good as the old layout.

The width of the left dark blue area in the non-scrollable bottom line
(which contains “»|« RT 3.3.HEAD Copyright 1996-2004 Best Practical
Solutions, LLC.”) does not match the width of the dark blue area
above: it’s a bit too small. (I observe this glitch with Mozilla
1.7.2.)

I suspect that this area is also responsible for less responsive
scrolling in Mozilla. My workstation features pretty fast 2D
graphics, but scrolling is a bit clunky. I fear it’s quite bad on
less powerful machines.