Notes from a wireframe world

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PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) can and has been used in lots of different ways to generate everything on a website, from HTML to Graphics, to PDF files. However one thing appears to have slipped under the radar of PHP developers and web site designers (maybe because both designers and developers guard there own domains very tightly) is using PHP to generate CSS files.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to put a design around the content of a website, however there are a number of problems (mostly due to Microsoft) in their use, different browsers have different levels of adherence to CSS rules etc.

Traditionally designers have either used non-standard tags or other work-a-rounds to design different sheets for different browsers, this of course has increased the design time. However PHP has the functionality to be able to detect what browser is calling it, and so, be able to serve the correct CSS for that browser.

This still doesn’t significantly reduce the overhead in designing for multiple browsers on its own however there nothing to stop someone writing an in-house tool that takes a standard CSS file (written for browser X) and then generate a PHP script (or at least the input for a script) for multiple browsers. This of course will still need testing by human designers and most likely tweaking, but it should reduce the time needed to produce different versions of the same CSS file.

But there are also other tricks PHP can do to aid the design process. Since the whole of the layout process is governed by CSS it can be used to display different images dependent on, for example the time of the day, or month of the year.

I’ve been looking how to use Javascript to move HTML elements around a page, just as iGoogle does with the applet boxes.

I’ve found some intresting stuff at walterzorn.com and if there is an save or load button the layout could be saved/loaded from a MySQL database (or anyother database) with some ease.

This would allow the user to design there screen the way they wanted based on a template which is set-up when the user signs up.