BlueGriffon^TM

I am very happy to report that Bob Stein, the man behind VisiBone.com and the author of the amazing 216-Color Webmaster's Palette has given BlueGriffon the rights to include his palette in the app ! Stay tuned !

Just a short note (from the W3C Technical Plenary Meeting on the French Riviera) to let readers of this blog know it's now syndicated on planet.mozilla.org.

bluegriffon-20081013-win32.zip.

• built on XP Pro, contains xulrunner 1.9.1b1pre
• if you already installed a previous version of BlueGriffon, it's better to clobber the application data, so please delete directory c:\Documents and Settings\<login>\Application Data\Disruptive Innovations SARL\BlueGriffon
• just unzip in a newly created dir to install (remove that dir to uninstall)

Already working fine, only remain a few minor details to iron.

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...

Here are the last changes on the web site:

• I configured our blog manager in order to have better urls. You should change the address of the atom/rss2 content in your feed reader.
• Comments are now allowed !
• The forum has been moved to /forum
• I worked on the design of the forum. It's better, isn't it ?

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

One of the nice features of text editors is table formatting. Think MS Word and its Table Autoformat dialog. It's very easy to implement that in BlueGriffon... Hehe

bluegriffon-20081002-win32.zip. I guess the filename says it all. Warnings:

• it's a so early version that no doubt you will be disappointed
• built on XP Pro, contains xulrunner 1.9.1b1pre
• just unzip in a newly created dir to install, remove that dir to uninstall
• to clobber the application data, delete directory c:\Documents and Settings\<login>\Application Data\Disruptive Innovations SARL\BlueGriffon

Tables are much nicer when the only attribute they carry is a class or an ID, aren't they?

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.