forrest:views concept (Draft -feature planed for 0.8)

Like stated in the Skin documentation file the aim of the forrest skins is to provide many capabilities so that extra skins are not needed. Our experience showed that many forrest user had to create a new skin because the default skin did not offer the feature their wanted to use. That leaded us to develop a new concept of creating skins that would be easily extensible by a user.

The aim of the upcoming "forrest:views" skinning concept is to provide a flexible framework for creating site and page specific layout in different formats.

The problem with the forrest skins so far has been that "only" the design changed (html-skeleton), but still we had to write a completely new skin and implement all functionality. Another problem was that the functionality was not easy extensible by a user. Then we decided to support the a standard regarding naming conventions for css elements. This standard has been developed on the OSCOM website, where you can find some more background informations.

"A naming convention is an attempt to systematize names in a field so they unambiguously convey similar information in a similar manner." wordiq-definition

That leaded to the development of the "leather-dev" skin which established a semantic container approach for div elements. The problems with leather-dev was pointed out on the mail status on leather-dev?