BlueGriffon^TM

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.

Usually, the second revamping of a dialog starts looking good.... So here's the first one and I find it much much better than the original proposal:

We just built BlueGriffon for the first time on a Mac, only to discover we have a lot to do on the theme's side for that platform. But thanks to Laurent, we now have a cool build process on all platforms that will allow us to push fresh meat to this web site more often than before.

A lot of progress on the table layout side. It's near completion. It's now possible to create new table layouts and modify existing ones. Only remain on the radar horizontal and vertical alignment controls.

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 !

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)

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...

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

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.