Augh! Buttons!
(I think DSpace is cruising for its own category. Maybe after I fix CavLec’s styling problems.)
Set phasers on “confusticate and bebother these developers,” Mr. Spock. I just spent all day trying to figure out why the hell I couldn’t get submission buttons working in my install the way they work in a normal DSpace install.
See, in said normal DSpace install, they look like cute little ellipses chained in a line with instructions in them. Steps you’ve completed are marked with filled-in red ellipses and are buttons, so that you can click to go back; steps you haven’t finished are outlined in gray and grayed-out; the current step is outlined in red.
Except in my new one, they’re just buttons, and they look dreadful and don’t at all explain what’s going on. Can’t have that, so I started fiddling.
Firefox does a magnificent job of ignoring styling on input buttons. I messed with it for two solid hours, trying to get it to admit that color and background-color are meaningful concepts to it. No soap.
So I copied the CSS from the original DSpace stylesheet. Surely that would work?
Nope. Persistent soap absence. WTF?
Nothing I did—and I did a lot of things—fixed it. Try as I might, those cute little elliptical buttons just weren’t happening.
Finally I had to tool over to MARS and start a bogus submission (don’t worry; I’ll never finish it, so it won’t mess up our live server) to sort out what was going on.
It was all a cheat. A cheat, I tell you! The CSS in their file is meaningless! Here’s what they do. Some widget somewhere takes generic GIF ellipse backgrounds and slaps messages onto them when DSpace is built. The resulting GIFs are saved to a folder and plopped onto the page, either as a straight <img> element or as part of an <input type="image"> element. If for some reason this chain of events gets broken (and I’m still not sure how I broke it, but I clearly did break it!), there’s a plain-vanilla HTML backup, which is how I was getting my wholly-unstyleable buttons.
(If there’s a workaround to Firefox’s unstyleable buttons, I’d surely appreciate hearing about it—)
Unfortunately, understanding the problem didn’t hand me the solution this time. I busily delved into the program code, hoping to turn off the <input> elements for parts of the submission process that haven’t happened yet (because that, if you like, is confusing—input buttons that don’t do anything!).
The other possibility was replacing DSpace’s colored background GIFs with something that works better with my current design. If I could get whatever build process it is to work again, that is. I hated this idea, though, because text-as-graphics irritates the life out of me.
It gets better. Hold onto your hats, folks.
The images were a DSpace 1.2 thing. DSpace 1.3 got rid of them. I spent all damn day chasing down a code-change between versions. (And, yes, this does mean that MARS is running 1.2 while my staging server is running 1.3. Feature, not bug.)
I shouldn’t have to do this. I really, really shouldn’t. It’s maddening. Fundamental pieces of DSpace’s usability shouldn’t be this vulnerable to tweaking, nor should any designer be stuck with DSpace’s developers’ notion of color and shape choice.
I am brainstorming a paper on DSpace usability and customization issues. Anybody want to coauthor?