While I agree that the woodstock components have complicated theme
structure, the components do not dictate the page layout.It is up to
you, how you create the layout with divs etc and then place the
components there. I've put some information in my blog.
http://blogs.sun.com/winston/entry/creating_css_page_layout
- Winston
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:
-----
"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.
- Modify theme characteristics at the application level.
- Understand how theme properties for components can be defined
and
delivered in a jar file or application
- 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."
------
and this:
-----
"
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."
-----
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.