> I think it's simple enough to do this with ids and classes, though, and even when it does break, the time it takes to fix it is going to have a pretty trivial impact on your overall project because the problem is solvable.
The real issue is that now the designer needs to mentally figure out "is this a safe refactoring" for every change. Because he doesn't have the real application running there, he can't verify if it works or not. I fear that this might lead to "leave the markup alone; change CSS only"-mentality from the designers because they don't want to introduce the animators for a simple design change. (You might say that changing only the CSS was the "right" solution anyway, but sometimes things becomes more much simpler when you can e.g. just wrap something in a div).
> If you have extra links that are there when the moderator is logged in, they should be there in any template with that structural element in it and then removed if the person logged in isn't a moderator.
Aha, but how can the designer see how it looks like for regular users? He probably wants to make sure that it looks good without the link too (maybe it's more like a button which floats). It seems like a sub-optimal workflow to manually remove the link (or display:none it) every time he works on the regular user page. (He must also remember to put it back in.)
> This is considerably less complex than having an entire framework/application environment installed and kept current.
Fair enough.
> … Dreamweaver …
If an editor can make it easier to work with the templates, that's good. Just don't make it impossible to work with the files unless you use some proprietary editor…
The real issue is that now the designer needs to mentally figure out "is this a safe refactoring" for every change. Because he doesn't have the real application running there, he can't verify if it works or not. I fear that this might lead to "leave the markup alone; change CSS only"-mentality from the designers because they don't want to introduce the animators for a simple design change. (You might say that changing only the CSS was the "right" solution anyway, but sometimes things becomes more much simpler when you can e.g. just wrap something in a div).
> If you have extra links that are there when the moderator is logged in, they should be there in any template with that structural element in it and then removed if the person logged in isn't a moderator.
Aha, but how can the designer see how it looks like for regular users? He probably wants to make sure that it looks good without the link too (maybe it's more like a button which floats). It seems like a sub-optimal workflow to manually remove the link (or display:none it) every time he works on the regular user page. (He must also remember to put it back in.)
> This is considerably less complex than having an entire framework/application environment installed and kept current.
Fair enough.
> … Dreamweaver …
If an editor can make it easier to work with the templates, that's good. Just don't make it impossible to work with the files unless you use some proprietary editor…