CSS Interaction
User Experience
As some of you are undoubtedly aware, we’ve attempted to do a few different things with our release of the Signature 4 control panel. One of those “things” is allowing the user the ability to customize their workspace. While the initial thrust of this effort was aimed at our resellers, and has been termed “re-branding”, it is, in essence, simply the option for the end user to manipulate their UI (user interface) to better suit their work habits. But what I’m mainly interested in here, is how you, our customer, might interact with the CSS.
You might be wondering, what do I mean by “interact”? Well, to put it simply, the branding (or “look and feel”) of the UI (user interface) depends heavily upon the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). So, in order to fully change the interface, one would have to manipulate the CSS. It is true that you can minimize and move certain items and that they will remain that way. And for those of you familiar with Verio’s “langtag” system you know that there is a certain level of customization inherent in that system. But still… So much more can be accomplished with CSS.
So that’s what we did, with the advent of Signature 4, we started utilizing CSS for all of the heavy lifting on the display layer. Some positioning and ALL of the tabular data is still handled by tables. It would be marvelous to get away from any positioning that is dictated by the markup, but currently there are some “issues” in regards to cross-browser compatibility.
Enough rambling. The intent of this blog is to get some type of discourse going about how you, our Verio customers, might expect to interact with the CSS in order to carry out an in-depth branding effort. Again though, what’s meant by interact? Well, I’ll throw out a few examples…this is in no way a complete list, it’s just a few suggestions.
- Allow the end-user (you) access to a style sheet. When I say “a style sheet”, this means is that there will be more than one style sheet. One will be a Verio defined default that will be occasionally updated, among others (print, mobile, etc.). And then of course there would be a style sheet that’s “open” to our customers. This style sheet could be edited in a file manager (txt editor type application) mode or maybe it could be downloaded, edited and replaced, or maybe you could just write your own and point the UI (via langtags) to a remote style sheet.
- Or there could be some type of UI available. Something similar to a WYSIWYG editor or maybe even as simple as a text editor. There are many ways to do this. We could have an “edit” mode that would allow an end-user the ability to make minor “inline” changes to colors, font, and some images etc. Or we could have a stand alone interface that would open while you’re in the Control Panel that would provide you a multitude of choices through control mechanisms like pull down lists and things like that.
So I’ve listed just two examples of possibly many. What do you think? HOW would you like to interact with the CSS? Are you the kind of person who likes to get their hands dirty and dig into the CSS itself? Or is that just not your bailiwick, and you’d much rather make changes via a polished UI? OR do you have a different idea of how you might like to edit the CSS? Give me a shout and comment right here. Let us know what you’re thinking. And as always, thanks for being a Verio customer.