New UI & licencing

[Nick Coghlan]

On 19 January 2015 at 06:24, Mads Kiilerich <mads at kiilerich.com> wrote:
> A first milestone could be to load bootstrap.css in root.html and tweak our
> css until it "works" and looks ok. That is probably mainly a question of
> removing stuff from our css.
>
> A next milestone could be to clean things up further by removing as much of
> our css as possible while making sure it still looks ok ... and perhaps more
> like "boring" plain bootstrap.

When it comes to infrastructure software, "boring" is another way of
saying "familiar", and that's not a bad thing at all - there's a
reason client operating system vendors have quite comprehensive user
interface development guidelines :)

> Another milestone is to move as much explicit styling out of the templates
> as possible. (I do however have this idea of keeping the "essential" styling
> in the templates (or in a base.css). Stuff like which elements should be
> hidden by default (until shown by javascript). I don't know if that is
> feasible and a good idea.)

For Beaker, we actually ended up resorting to checking in our LESS
files and generating the CSS at application startup. The key reason is
that CSS doesn't natively support style inheritance, which meant that
doing site-specific themes with only CSS required completely rewriting
the styling. With LESS, you get style inheritance capabilities, so
operators of specific installations can tweak the theme without
needing to completely replace it.

I can't say I *love* the way we do things in Beaker (especially the
"run Node.js on the server just to generate the CSS files" part), I
just like it better than using CSS directly.

> I guess that would bring us to a point where we quite easily can change the
> actual look of the application. That's where the fun starts ;-)
>
> Both the MIT and the BSD license are compatible with GPL and can be included
> without any problems. See LICENSE.md .
>
> I am not a front-end guy and can't say I really _know_ bootstrap but it
> seems like a good idea. I had not heard about Polymer Paper Elements but it
> seems fine. Similar to AngularJS in being declarative but more of a toolkit
> than a full framework and thus easier to introduce gradually in an existing
> application. I do however not know how widely used it is and how long it
> will stay around. (One issue: We currently try to support IE8. I guess that
> could change, especially considering the current browser landscape and
> Kallithea target audience.)

If Kallithea sticks with Bootstrap as the base for its CSS
infrastructure, then I'd actually personally try to nudge things in
the direction of https://www.patternfly.org/, which is Bootstrap
based, but goes a bit further into higher level styling and UI
structural issues that help create a familiar-feeling user experience
across a wider range of projects. I'm completely biased on that
though, since PatternFly was born as a Red Hat project to help bring
some consistency the UIs of our shipping products, and we're looking
at adopting it for internal tools like beaker-project.org as well.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia