I prefer to work directly in ascx. Maybe its because I have been using HTML for about 12 years and have worked in php that I’m comfortable with it. I don’t use WYSIWYG like Dreamweaver and like a good designer, I work on a Mac

Whether its an “artist” thing are not, I don’t know. Being a designer, I use things like pencils and photoshop to do the design side of my work and pull out Textmate and my favorite FTP program to do the development side. I try to implement the cleanest code possible and leave the creativity for the design side of things (well, you have to be creative when you are trying to get CSS structure to work in IE 6).

I do look forward to DNN 5.0. I really hope the 3rd party module creators follow suit and make their modules more xhtml compliant.

Thanks!

Lisa

The second issue I’ve seen, and maybe this is just designers not understanding how to do skins, is that links to the CSS get embedded in the skin.

Maybe that’s been fixed recently? I don’t know. I’m a developer writing from a developers perspective and who has had to fix too many skins I’ve purchased that have had these two issues.

As for converting designers. First, I’ve successfully converted several to using the most recent versions of Visual Studio or Express once they realize that the tool does a better job of producing a presentation layer for ASP.NET than their tool of choice. When I’ve let my designer use their tool, I’ve had to rip out any controls they’ve put in and replace them with .NET controls. Double the work for nothing. This is ASP.NET specific, but, most of my designers are going to be doing work on my modules as well.

Second, this series is written primarily for .NET people. Programmers who have to do design work. If a person who is strictly a designer benefits from what I’ve written, GREAT! But, that’s not the target, and like it or not, more often than not, the bulk of the programmers out there double as designers.

Finally, my experience has been that the designers I have the most respect for are willing to at least give some other tool a try if they are given enough of a reason to. If you have a designer who isn’t willing to at least try making a skin using Visual Studio Express, you probably need a new designer.

I’m glad to hear we won’t need the XML file anymore. That never made any sense to me. I really hope the embedded CSS thing is fixed, or that it gets fixed. But, I really don’t think it is possible to fix the DIV issue, or for the designer to get the control is will want even with those two fixes unless he uses the ASCX method of developing a skin. He might do the initial creation using HTML and run it through the parser, but I think he’ll need to do “clean up” on the final output at the very least. And, he’ll learn while he’s doing that clean up that he might as well do it as an ASCX file to begin with.

As for designers, I learned a long time ago that you will not get them to give up their tool of choice. It is an “artist” thing. We should accept it and make DotNetNuke better so that it does not matter which tool you choose to use.