Blackstone... Wow! · 336 words posted 08/07/2004 08:38 AM
Macromedia has posted a preview of Blackstone (via JD and many others), and all I can say is “Wow!” The new form features in particular look great, and it’s exciting to see MM offering commercial support for XForms.
I’m not on the alpha, so I don’t know to what extent these ideas have already been discussed, but here are my first reactions:
- Please don’t use Blackstone forms to drive adoption of 8Ball (the next full version of Flash). I hope Blackstone launches with forms support for the oldest version of Flash player possible, either 7 or 6.79; otherwise, developers will have to invest time in building parallel HTML forms, and clients won’t want to fund them.
- Please don’t reinvent the wheel with CFDOCUMENT. As exciting as the new feature looks, there’s a way to handle printing with open standards that a lot of developers already use with great success: print style sheets.
Here’s what the Blackstone preview says about printing:
The CFDOCUMENT tag and its child tags allow you simply to wrap HTML, CSS, and CFML content within a tag pair so that you can render printable versions of the content.
That sounds pretty ad hoc: go from page to page and wrap printable content with a CFDOCUMENT tag. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if:
- You could wrap an entire page in a CFDOCUMENT tag, and add an attribute:
style="myPrintStyle.css". Then the page would print to FlashPaper or PDF using the print style sheet. Or even better— - You could simply put the CFDOCUMENT tag in your Application.cfm file, and specify
style="myPrintStyle.css". Then any page in your entire site could print to FlashPaper or PDF using your print style sheet with one line of code.
Again, I’m not on the alpha; maybe Macromedia is already planning support for these features. Leveraging work we’ve already done (print style sheets) or saving us from doing parallel work (i.e., don’t require the latest and greatest Flash player version for forms) will greatly hasten adoption of Blackstone.
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1. On Aug 9, 09:11 AM Tim Lucas said:
> Please don’t reinvent the wheel with CFDOCUMENT. As exciting as the new feature looks, there’s a way to handle printing with open standards that a lot of developers already use with great success: print style sheets.
Print style sheets just don’t cut it when it comes to document control—even using CSS3 features and a standards compatible browser.
Print style sheets are for printing web pages, not for printing content which exists, and was designed to be printed. Consistent printing results across today’s browsers is difficult to say the least.
> That sounds pretty ad hoc: go from page to page and wrap printable content with a CFDOCUMENT tag.
That’s probably because whilst we’re in a world of app-scoped OO CFCs the other 99% of cf development is adhoc.
I wouldn’t worry though. Given MM’s track record I’d be confident that the feature is usable from Application.cfm or any type of framework. #