[dev] Usability and UI in Horde

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Rohan Dsouza <rohandsouza at gmail.com>:

> As you have mentioned, i would love to work on the standards part. As well
> as in the HTML/CSS coding standards.
> I have worked for the same in the past for a few projects.

Great!

> To begin with i am going through the Gnome UI guide. I have found it quite
> useful and we could adapt the same to Horde's needs.
> Next i will begin reviewing the screens and capture these in form of
> a document. Further we could add some changes to the UI. Here we could begin
> working on improving the UI, the CSS and the HTML. Once we are done with
> alteast a working draft i can go ahead and create the document with
> guidelines and standards.

This all sounds great to me. I'm looking forward to it already. ;)

> I might need some help from your end, as i am not very technical in
> installing and running applications from my machine. Currently i use horde
> as webmail for my personal website :).

Of course. There are also places where our "state of the art"  
disagrees with itself; for instance, I'm currently partial to the  
table styling in Chora (see http://cvs.horde.org/), but we haven't  
updated other apps to be similar. That styling also accounts for a  
bunch of dynamic features (clickable headers for dynamic sorting,  
etc.) that are making their way into other apps. So feel free to ask  
where there are instances of various UI elements.

Forms is another divergent area. I'd like to see us use Horde_Form  
(our forms generation/validation/processing package) for most  
(probably never all) forms in our apps, and to make sure we can use  
the same CSS/xhtml structure for even non-Horde_Form forms. There's a  
whole new set of layouts for that in the incubator in CVS, so that's  
another one that will take work. Actually that's a good point to ask  
you specifically about - the markup that the new xhtml forms renderer  
generates. When you're ready (if you want to) tackle that, let me know  
and we can work out a way to get you a good demo page to play with.

Welcome!

Thanks,
-chuck

-- 
"we are plastered to the windshield of the bus that is time." - Chris