I am leery about this whole theme business. Is there anyway to totally
ditch the themes and just construct stuff using my own CSS? I am
staying away from Netbeans visual web since it seems to difficult to
make things look the way I want them to using established technology and
using divs etc a la CSS Zen Garden.
I would be much happier if you provided a mechanism to create bare bones
web pages with the cool components, allowing me to create my own
layouts. It is a shame that back end and component developers keep
insisting on forcing people to design their web pages according to their
look and feel and not allow them to lay things out with established
technology and is something they are comfortable with.... Please stop
complicating things and needlessly forcing us to learn new cumbersome
tools to do things we already can do more simply.
Some of the goals of good web design are to separate the presentation
from the application code. You are putting them back together. STOP
IT. :-/ Please. Let me remind you of the first section of your theme
documentation on your wiki:
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"This document will try to introduce the features and capabilities of
the Woodstock Theme implementation. The expectation is that the
developer will be able to perform the following tasks with the help of
this document. But this document is not intended to be the only resource
needed to successfully perform these tasks. For example creating a
component jar with theme support or creating a theme will most likely
require more intimate knowledge of the theme implementation including
reading java documentation and source code.
1. Modify theme characteristics at the application level.
2. Understand how theme properties for components can be defined and
delivered in a jar file or application
3. Understand how to create a new theme distinct from
|webui-jsf-suntheme.jar|. This is a very difficult task and this
document cannot guarantee that a successful alternate theme can be
created that drastically alters the theme implementation from the
standard |webui-jsf-suntheme.jar| implementation."
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and this:
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" Creating a theme is a very difficult and time consuming task. There
are a large number of CSS selectors, images, Javascript files, and HTML
templates that are all interrelated. A change to one can have
undesirable effects on another. For example a CSS selector definition
and Javascript may be dependent on the HTML used to represent a component."
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A shame. I have learned in life that if I have a question, many others
in the room likely do too. Similarly, if I don't want to use this or
any other visual web tool because of you make it too difficult for me to
create my own look and page design, then for sure there are many others
who feel the same way.
Good luck, but I think I will look elsewhere.
Cheers.