I need to build a prototype for an intranet website, and I want to focus on usability (layout, navigability, etc) and leave the theme for later (I have very bad taste, so this will probably be done by someone else)
I know about ASP.NET's capability of switching themes instantly, but how do I have to design the WebForms for it to be easy later?
Should I create controls with a class attribute pointing to something that will exist in the future css?
Or do I simply create the controls without worrying about this and it'll be handled easily when we create the theme?
If you're planning on using ASP.NET Themes, then you can design all of the controls generically and add Skins later on. Depending on the complexity of the design (meaning how many different styles you have for textboxes or gridviews, etc), this might not save you a lot of work, but it's one way to use the built-in .Net support for theming.
Make sure you use a MasterPage so that all of your sub pages will have a common base, and give all of your elements good IDs, because you will still need to get your hands dirty with CSS to put it all together.
Here's a link to a decent Themes & Skins tutorial. Knowing what you'll have to do in the future to add this in will make it easier to design for it now.
I'd like to make the argument for ignoring themes altogether and using nothing but CSS. It's never been clear to me what value themes add; it's a very Microsoft-specific approach, and its output isn't always standards-compliant. By using CSS you will widen the pool of potential designers able to work on your project, and you will have a better chance of having a cross-browser and standards-compliant site.
If someone else is going to be styling this later, I'd just make sure that you provide enough "hooks" for them to be able to design this. This means adding CSS classes to pretty much everything you do that will be styled similarly, and wrapping things in divs or spans with CSS classes where appropriate, for example
<div class="ButtonContainer">
<asp:linkbutton runat="Server" cssclass="Button Cancel" command="Save" text="Save" />
<asp:linkbutton runat="Server" cssclass="Button Save" command="Cancel" text="Cancel" />
</div>
If you don't have a solid understanding of CSS and you don't have in-house naming conventions or standard style sheets, though, you won't really know how to structure your divs and classes. In our shop, the way we handle this is the programmer just writes standard ASP.NET markup, and the designer goes through and adds divs, spans, and class names that work with the style sheet they will develop.
Skins are probably the answer, but something about that irks me (maybe because I don't like being that vendor specific and I'd like my skills to be applicable to other web languages and platforms than .NET). I prefer to use CssClass attributes on all of my ASP.Net controls and carefully class everything else and to use as much semantic markup as possible. Then, when I get the controls set up and working, I use CSS to style everything (although I usually have to tweak the HTML and JavaScript stuff at this point).
Another developer I work with prefers to do everything the Microsoft way with Skins and page directives and so on. It's probably the best way to do it, but it feels to me like it's mixing too much of the presentation into the middle and back-end of the application.
just wrap your controls in divs. will make layout/style much easier in the end
Related
I'm tasked with evaluating some legacy web pages (classic asp) for accessibility. You can assume the HTML is not perfectly formed and that it's loaded with inline javascript and that we make use of javascript libraries that vomit HTML to create dynamic features. It's a circus in there.
While I recognize that the obvious answer is to re-write the page(s), that's not an option in our given time tables. So I'm trying to find the best way to make the pages work with a screen reader. Here's what I think I know.
We can use JAWS scripting to instruct the browser how to read the page.
We can use ARIA attributes to give the pages better organization and structure.
Specifically, I'm trying to figure out:
Question 1) If a JAWS script is present, will it be used exclusively by the browser/screen reader and ignore any improvements I make in the underling HTML structure?
Question 2) Could some well-place ARIA attributes give the page enough structure so that the default screen reader properties will work in an acceptable manner (without a JAWS script).
Question 3) I suspect the tough answer is that I would need to do both, which I'm trying to avoid because we barely have the capacity to do just one. But we don't want to lose a customer, of course. :-(
Many thanks for any input.
Instead of explaining only to JAWS how to access your pages, use JavaScript to explain it to any Assistive Technology (AT) for the web. I expect the same effort, while it will profit way more users.
In a JAWS script you would need to describe ways to access DOM nodes that are not accessible. That would include
speaking out information that you have to find elsewhere on the page
adding keyboard navigation where it's missing
Both can be done in JavaScript, probably even easier (you'll need to address DOM elements).
What you will need to avoid is restructuring the DOM and changes to classes, since those are most likely used by the scripts that generate them.
But I'd expect that adding attributes and keyboard handlers will do no harm to the existing scripts. Beware of already existing handlers for focus or keyboard events, though.
I would recommend making a list of attributes and handlers you suspect to conflict with the existing scripts, and searching the scripts for these, like onkeypress or onfocus event handlers.
The absolute best way to make your application/site accessible is to use semantic HTML. It doesn't matter if that HTML is generated by asp or jsp or whatever.
If you have a table, use a <table>.
If you have a heading, use an <h2>.
If you have a list, use a <ul>.
Use <section>, <article>, <nav>, <aside>, <header>, <footer>, etc
That's how you create structure on your page that a screen reader user will appreciate.
If you can't use native HTML, then fall back to ARIA, but treat it like salt. A little bit greatly enhances the flavor but too much spoils the meal.
If you can't use a native <h2>, then make sure you use the appropriate role and attributes.
<div role="heading" aria-level="2">this is my custom h2</div>
If you can't use a native <header>, then make sure you use the appropriate role and attributes.
<div role="banner">my header stuff goes in here</div>
I would recommend totally forgetting about JAWS scripts. It doesn't matter if that's what the customer thinks they should focus us. It's not about that customer. It's about that customer's customers. The end users. They should be able to use whatever screen reader they are used to using and most comfortable with. That's the whole purpose of accessibility - making the site usable and accessible by as many people as possible using whatever assistive technology they are used to using.
Following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) will lead you to that result.
Is it possible to change the default template of each ASP.NET server control? In WPF and Silverlight, each control is supposed to be lookless, so the developer can provide a user-defined control template to change how the control looks. If, for example, I want to use an outer and inner square/rectangle other than an outer and inner circle in a RadioButton, how do I accomplish that?
Don't have much experience with ASP but we used to work with Prado a lot (a PHP framework that behaves much like ASP .NET).
I would say the easiest thing to do is assign a CSS class to the component, which you should be able to do to any ASP .NET component and then simply use CSS to style the component.
At the end of the day, its all spat out to the browser as HTML anyway, so there's no real reason why you couldn't style it using CSS.
I recommend you don't use the standard CSS classes, unless you want all instances of a particular component to the look the same for your application.
We write a lot of Ajax apps and this is what we do.
ASP.NET has support for Themes and Skins. You can use a combination of skins and CSS (packaged up into a theme for convenience) to apply some styles to your controls. However, different browsers on different operating systems may render various controls slightly differently (for example take a look at how radio buttons are rendered). I'm not sure how much control you'll have over that behavior.
Since Themes in ASP.NET are used to style elements of your site, I was just wondering why would you use Themes rather than CSS, or is it common practice to use both? If so, when would you opt for one versus the other and why?
Just seems to me like Themes are kind of unnecessary, so I am just looking on clarification if there really is a good reason to use them, or it's just a part of the framework as an alternative(unnecessary) step to styling your site.
Imagine you have a site that, for whatever reason, uses dozens of asp:Calendar controls.
To style them with CSS alone, you'll have to set loads of properties on each one: DayStyle and TitleStyle and NextPrevStyle and on and on...
Using a theme will allow you to set all of those properties just once, and have it apply to every asp:Calendar on the site. The theme would contain the same CSS, but also the declaration of how to apply that CSS to server controls, which is something you can't easily do otherwise.
Of course, as Brian Hasden already said, you'll probably need some "global" CSS that lives outside of the theme (particularly if your site has multiple themes).
Themes have the benefit of being tightly integrated into the whole .NET environment so that things get themed without needing to specify their styles. It happen automagically like lots of other things in .NET. Based on that I can see the appeal for some people.
That being said, I personally never use the whole themes deal because I feel like it requires you to maintain two different sets of styles. One that's part of the theme and then others that are inevitably needed outside of the whole theming deal.
Maybe I'm just a control freak or dislike themes due to bad usage on previous projects.
On most projects I've been one, designers has produced HTML code, then developers turned it into ASP.NET, including master-pages etc that should really be a part of design.
After it has become ASP.NET, designers could not work on the code with their tools.
I know that a lot of the design of ASP.NET is made with the purpose of separating code and design, and in principle designers should be able to work on design aspects with the Visual Web Developer, but I've never seen a designer using VWD.
How is cooperation done in practice, and what is about the best one can expect from a designer?
From someone who does both:
Most of the design should be done with CSS, so this isn't a problem.
The layout of the page, therefore, comes down to elements with IDs and classes (simplistically speaking).
I try to keep these IDs and classes as is, and place ContentPlaceHolders inside them as needed, when possible, and create controls or skins with the right classes.
Optimally, designers and programmers should work together, and know each others limitations and requirements (this cannot always be done, sometimes these are done by different companies). I think most of the responsibility here lies on the developers - they need the right controls to get the expected output.
Frankly, a web designer should care about HTML and CSS, not about what server-side technology is used to deliver them. The best I would expect from a web designer is to write flexible CSS, that can take a view changes to the HTML structure without breaking (that is - extra divs or tables, as ASP.NET tends to do).
A good ASP.NET developer will intelligently use the set of controls available. For example, in most cases, the ListView will do everything the GridView can, and produce clean, SEO-friendly markup.
In the ASP.NET environment, I would encourage the use of Expression by designers. Business owners can avail of the new deal from Microsoft and obtain VS, Expression, etc., for $100 for three years.
I think both developers and designers have to embrace each others world for anything to work.
We are still stuck with the old fashioned way of the designer producing PSD documents and hopefully rendering them into HTML.
Then we take them over and convert them to .Net, then the designer requests a change and we go in circles for a while before coming to an acceptable solution.
It would be nice if the designer could integrate into the HTML of .Net easier but I don't see that happening for a while, not while Microsoft advocates using scripting in your development..
I've found that using ASP.NET MVC will make the designer's job much easier. Especially if you stay away from using things like HTML.RenderImage, and instead place an IMG tag on the page with <%= ViewData["MyImage"] %> as the src. This will allow the designer to see the html they like and understand, while giving you the flexibility to set the source(which is all the developer should be doing). The goal being to stay away from ASP.NET controls, which would confuse a designer, while still keeping their flexibility to develop quickly.
I'm a long time winforms developer and one of the things I really liked was the layout manager controls they had like flowlayoutpanel or gridlayout. unfortunately these don't seem to exist in asp.net or do they?
I'm in the process of modifying my existing asp.net website to use css instead of tables, but when I go into the visual studio design mode it looks terrible.
It's really difficult to wrap my head around all these floats, div:clears and css tricks and then test and retest in every browser. Surely there must be a better way. Ideally a layout manager control which would display properly in design mode, act as a container, be lightweight, and use smart enough to emit tables or css depending on the browser abilities.
does such a control exist as part of asp.net, open source, or commercial add-on?
Using tables instead of DIVs and css can certainly help with laying things out (a lot of people will think this is bad practice, but its works)
Also, have a look at the asp.net Repeater and ListView components. The ListView is very good in that you have a lot of control over the layout and the rendered html, I would look at that.
First thing - don't rely on the VS Designer. It's not a browser. Because each browser implements css in potentially different ways, your only option is to test in the browsers that you think your target market will use.
At first, css positioning can seem a bit confusing, but if you stick with it, you will be able to wrap your head around it. There is no such control as you describe that I know of. CSS is part of a web developers required learning, just as SQL is if you need to use a database etc.