BlueGriffon^TM

The BlueGriffon Team wishes you a very happy new year 2009!

Speaking of wishes, BlueGriffon will not only be able to apply themes to a page, but also get themes from online repositories. We're working on a themes' manifest all web sites distributing themes could serve. Giving the URL of that file to BlueGriffon would be the only thing needed to use a theme coming from that web site inside BlueGriffon. Stay tuned.

The "New Page" wizard being done and checked in, I started working on the Projects manager because w/o that, impossible to correctly handle jQuery-based pages and so on.

I have some great news : I got formal authorization from Yahoo! to add YUI-based CSS Layouts to BlueGriffon. Let me thank Yahoo! (and in particular Nate Koechley and Christian Heilmann) and then Jake Myers, the guy behind the famous http://layouts.ironmyers.com. The first visible result is the new "New page wizard" that is not checked in yet. See below a very early screenshot of that wizard. Warning, the UI is not at all finalized.

A screenshot-based demo of table layouts. Create a basic table, open the layout dialog, find or create the one you want, click OK, done...

I've just added a context menu to the structure bar. The first menu item there is to manage the element's language.

Currently adding a UI element to control the zoom factor. This is an important accessibility tool that is so simple to add to a Gecko>1.8-based app that BlueGriffon should not exist without. Will be ready in a few hours from now I guess, if my dying Vaio laptop does not collapse before...

It's only a beginning but it already works beautifully...

One thing that has always puzzled me in existing HTML+CSS wysiwyg editors is the impossibility to create a table in a really strict markup context. I mean a table with no presentational attributes at all, no inline styles at all and only a class and/or ID or the table itself. Although almost nobody writes such tables, it's fairly simple for the most common attributes. I suspect it's for three reasons only : first, web sites use a lot of borderless tables ; second, existing editors don't let you do that ; third, most people don't understand CSS well enough. Let's suppose our table has ID mytable. Then we have the following equivalences:

• for the border attribute on the <table> element if the value if not "0".

  #mytable {
   border: outset <value_of_the_attribute>px;
  }
  
  #mytable > * > tr > td,
  #mytable > * > tr > th {
   border: inset 1px;
  }

• for the cellspacing attribute on the <table> element

  #mytable {
   border-spacing: <value_of_the_attribute>px;
  }

• for the cellpadding attribute on the <table> element

  #mytable > * > tr > td,
  #mytable > * > tr > th {
   padding: <value_of_the_attribute>px;
  }

• the rules and frame attributes on the table element is only a little bit more complex but it's a non-issue to map such an attribute to CSS rules.
• the width, align and valign attributes on <table> and descendants of <table> are also a non-issue with a trivial mapping to their CSS counterparts
• for the deprecated align attribute on <table>, a combination of 'margin-left: auto' and/or 'margin-right: auto'

In other terms, it's not a problem implementing an editor that provides a user wishing to insert a table with the following choice : "HTML attributes only", "Inline styles when possible", "Style rules or inline styles when possible". As a matter of fact, it's already implemented in BlueGriffon. Please don't focus on the UI since it's absolutely not final, it's even sure it's going to evolve a lot for instance to let the user reuse existing CSS style rules instead of creating new ones.