The Ultimate Make-Over of an IBM Lotus Domino Site (HND209)
Henry Newberry and Scott Good hosted the hands-on session. The databases were available on USB sticks so everybody could use their own laptop or one of the classrom machines. The session was pretty packed but not completely full. They had hand-outs for the session, it all was quite well-prepared (quite a difference to the hands-on I attended yesterday).
The session gives Notes developers a good start to developing web applications. They used the standard release 6.5 discussion database template and modified it so that it looks much nicer, got rid of the frames, the Java applets etc. Pretty much everything worked quite well, although the speed of the presentation was really fast so that developers without a solid experience may have had problems following. Scott explained the different CSS settings pretty well so that users with only a basic understanding of web development will surely take a lot away from the session.
A few comments on the session content: You wouldn't want to use the unit "pt" for font-size. This will break the page design on Macintosh computers. Also, for accessibility reasons font sizes should use relative units like "em", "ex" or "%". The same applies to the width and height of the divs and the absoulte positioning of elements should also be handeled with care. If a user wants to increase the font size in the browser the container blocks should resize (and move) also for the content to be still readable.
Developers wanting to go deeper into facelifting Domino web applications should also look into the stuff which was presented in session BP308.
Technorati tag: Lotusphere2006
