Ya learn something new every day!

02/02/2008 11:27 PM by Chris Toohey

Ever have one of those days where you try to do something that you don't think is possible, and then someone who you genuinely like and respect kindly points out that the ability to do said something is build right into the product?!

Yeah, that was me the other day...

I was trying to come up with a slick UI for Project: Yellowcake, which I think will garner a polar response in the community: you will either love it, or be completely apathetic. I swear I'll discuss the details of just what it is once I finish it off and get some testing underway (as there will be a call for testers for the BETA testing at least)... but I digress.

While trying to come up with this slick UI, I wanted to give it a totally Web 2.0 look. One of those UI tweaks was to have a centered container for the entire application (take a look at my site for example, all content - the meat of the material - is in a center-aligned DIV element. So, wanting this look for my Lotus Notes-based client but thinking that such functionality wasn't available, I started off on an attempt to hack my way there.

I first tried pass-thru HTML on a Form design element... with great success. I was able to get a beautifully centered TABLE element, with full support of the THEAD, TBODY and TFOOT elements. It was great. I felt like an innovator. I. Totally. Rocked.

And then I tried to put an embedded view element in the body.

If you've ever tried this, you'll notice that the pass-thru appears to break once it hits a Notes-specific element (such as an embedded view, image resource, etc.). I was so destroyed. I was about to shout from the rooftops about how the product was holding me back; not letting me do what I wanted - nay, needed to do!

Before hopping onto the 'blog and writing a post that would make both the original and current product line developers alike send me gift baskets and letters of apology, I thought I'd IM Tim and vent.

A few seconds later, and feeling like the worlds biggest idiot, I remove the entire design of the Form design element that I was playing around with and add a single column, single row table with the following attribute (highlighted below, but I'm sure everyone knows where this is by now...):