November 29, 2004

I LOVE good layout and design work...

I always find it a pleasure when I visit a web site that was designed and developed by those who understand good layout and design principles and subsequently put them into practice. I worked with a group of folks a while back in Colorado who somehow all seemed to “relocate” to the same company a few miles to the east of where we all originally worked together. While I migrated back to Salt Lake and Seattle they all stuck together and have built a pretty phat little company over there in Englewood, CO. It’s called Groople and from time to time I find myself pinging my old manager Brian Martinez (an old-time frequenter of XSL-List — in fact you can still find his mark on the list as he still holds the first spot on the first page of the FAQ stressing the importance of list etiquette) just to see what he’s up to and to reemphasize to him my evil plan and devious ploy to recruit him away at some point in the future — great manager, great developer, stands his ground, gets the job done… you know, the kind of guy you actually enjoy working for and with :).

Well it seems Brian has just finished up the layout work and underlying code-set that attaches into the backend of Groople’s booking engine — a marvel in and of itself - I know this because…. well, I just know this and they know why I know this and I guess for now thats all that matters :)

Now you might be saying “and this relates to XSLT how”? Well, beyond Brians connection to the list I believe that in many regards the XSLT developer population is closely connected, if not directly, to the design teams at many development firms. What comes from the mind of the designer must then be “interpreted” by the developer and a plan formulated on how to render the necessary data into the specified design format. Obviously the code being rendered in this case is a combination of HTML and CSS that, more likely than not, has its rendering roots, be it on the server or the client (well, most likely the server — hopefully this will be changing soon :) in a library of XSLT stylesheets. So while the connection may not be obvious from the outside those of us who know better are all shaking our heads right now saying “uh huh, yep.”

Now I should point out the fact that Groople’s site, from what I understand, doesnt have a whole lot of XSLT being used behind the GUI rendering scenes, if any. But this has everything to do with the fact that the application behind Grooples booking engine is built on .NET and Web Services and the original design of the system focused more on the components of ASP.NET to render a majority of the content for the site. So, simply put, static HTML templates and CSS files coupled with ASP.NET server side controls did exactly what was needed. And when something works you’re not even going to find me arguing that they should have used XSLT instead, especially given my passion for the .NET framework.

But I do know one thing… Brian is fully aware of the power that lays at his fingertips in XSLT. We just had a brief conversation on the state of client-side transformation capabilities and I think I can safely say that he was happily surprised to find that it was further along than he may have realized. I’m hoping that the sample file and tutorial I plan to publish here in a bit will help further enlighten and intrigue just enough to bring him to call upon his XSLT heavy past and start playing around with various possibilities with client-side rendering of both layout and data — who knows, maybe its the grasshopper who will be teaching the master this time ‘round ;)

Cheers Brian! Congratulations to you, Ed, Ty, and the rest of the Groople crew who have put together a fantastic example of web layout and design done right.

On a side note (directed at the Groople crew), recent events have led me to think its just about time for a trip to CO to pay a visit to my old buddies while at the same time cruz’ on up to Boulder to buy a beer and groove to some tracks with a new one. It seems that, for whatever reason, something is always drawing me back to Colorado ;) I’ll tell you what it is… its those Colorado women… OOooooooohhhh mama, gotta love them Colorado women… oh wait, this is a family blog.. sorry, kids!!! I best get back to work… :D