A Small Uni-Form Update and a Retrospect 2007-04-17 01:36
I must admit that I am really overwhelmed by the amount of feedback Uni-Form has received and that so many people have taken interest in it, so I guess a thank you to you all is in place first. There were so many good suggestions that I received from you guys that I was, am and will be listening to and pay great attention to. There are already some improvements, and we’ll get to it in a minute.
24. April 2007: Due to large amount of comment spam I am forced to close the comments on this entry, for all Uni-Form related questions please use the community site. Thanks.
The first thing on my ToDo list for Uni-Form is to reconsider the markup. Right now I must say that I am really hesitant to make any changes, but at the same time I am little bugged by the (arguably) extraneous markup. When I first wrote (and planned) the markup for this – I wanted it to be future-proof, I knew things will be added on later, that would demand some extra markup, the bottom line is this – the markup isn’t lightweight, but it is semantically correct and it allows for manipulation and serves as a good platform to build upon and gives the enough „room to play”.
Some News
- The JavaScript is rewritten using jQuery. Ilija did his magic and now we aren’t dependent on „parent of the parent” element when adding the class
.focused, it finds the.ctrlHolderclass automatically and does the rest. - There is a php handler for Uni-Form now. Mirko Kirović has written it, and I have passed it to Ilija to review since server side code really isn’t my thing, and I’m waiting on his feedback for that. This script Mirko has written has even an AJAX (HIJAX actually) field validation component, so that is really interesting.
- There will be a couple of flavors of Uni-Form in the future. Right now I think there will be two lightweight versions that won’t allow form layout choice, it will be either block labels or inline labels, you choose one and go with it. The CSS will be reorganized for easier modifications and maintenance (this is my weak spot on every project, I know…) and possibly some parts will be rewritten.
- Support for multi column forms. I must admit I am quite suprised by the amount of people requesting this feature. It will most probably be done by floating fieldsets with a percentage based width.
Thank You
Finally a thank you to all you guys taking interest in this project, digging and linking to it. Recently, besides the Digg hiatus Uni-Form has been included in Smashing Magazine’s best of March 2007 in the CSS techniques section, and also in Russ Weakly’s recent some links for light reading which I am personally a fan of and have been reading them for a while now. It’s kind of a success for me personally to be mentioned on that list. Also Uni-Form has been bookmarked on del.icio.us for more than 700 times, and has been downloaded around 3000 times which is really great.
Lastly, if you have any questions about Uni-Form (implementation or whatever) please don’t hesitate to ask in the original post. That’s all for now folks, expect an update very soon, I am looking forward to your invaluable feedback.
2007-04-17 01:36; No comments yet
