[pmwiki-devel] Is 'RightBar' the right name?

[Hans]

Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 3:42:37 AM, Jon wrote:

> All of what's said has been fine, but I thought I'd restate my point
> because it seemed to get lost here.  I think that when you have
> content labeled "sidebar" and "rightbar" it seems like it's supposed
> to appear in a given place on the page, i.e. in a sidebar.  But if you
> use semantic naming like PrimaryNavigation or whatever, then it
> doesn't really matter where it gets placed - thus making it easier to
> skin it.  So if you wanted to take the contents of SideBar and use CSS
> to create tabbed navigation across the top, it isn't really a sidebar
> anymore - but it's the same content, and it could make sense in either
> spot.  You might argue that if you want it on top you should just
> create a page called "PageTopMenu" or whatever, but to me it makes
> more sense to have pages marked "Navigation" and the skin should
> simply explain where to put the navigation pages, etc.

You can use this approach by creating semantic named pages like
PrimaryNavigation and include them in the relevant skin subpage:
i.e. in SideBar use (:include PrimaryNavigation:), in PageTopMenu use
(:include ActionLinks:) or something like it.

But the skin template needs to use location-based includes of subpages, to
handle the layout.

One thing we could argue about is, that SideBar should have been named
LeftBar. Then again, a skin designer could just use LeftBar in the skin
template, and let the admin worry what to put into it (i.e. SideBar or
PrimaryNavigation). But SideBar has become the default standard.


Hans