Something's running through my head that I'd like a little feedback on from the community. At some point we want to give you the ability to customize the look and feel of the Rhapsody Web Player. I see a couple of different technologies that can enable this. I'm wondering what folks think gives the best balance of power and ease of use.
One way is put all colors and images and layout information into CSS and enable devs to override our CSS with their own. This would let you change colors, adjust fonts and sizes, replace images, move parts around, and even hide components that you don't want. But the hidden components would still have all the code overhead of maintaining them -- our js code would still update them, but the user just wouldn't see them. Certainly not the end of the world, but a little slower than it needs to be. But computers are fast, right? I see this way offering a great deal of flexibility while staying accessible to a large number of web developers.
A more powerful way is to build the player display components in DHTML entirely in javascript. Start with a blank page with a bunch of empty <div> tags with appropriate names like "albumart" and "volumecontrol" and "playbutton". Then our js code would find the divs and fill them with display/control UI as appropriate using the DOM or .innerHTML. Devs could move the <div> tags around on the page or omit ones that they didn't need. The reason I see this as more powerful is that we'd set up each class of js code to render a display component so that it could be sub-classed and replaced by your own control which not only looks different but behaves completely differently as well. This is arguably slower to load than a straight HTML version. Another distinct advantage is that this way you can actually remove display components that you don't want, as opposed to just hiding them. Harder to do, but ultimately more flexible.
Comments?
-LPD
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