I dislike using lorem ipsum or other non-sensical text for mockups, but I admit that it fills a very real need for designing content-centric websites when the content isn't ready yet.<p>I've encountered just too many cases where the design looks great as a mock-up but when you start plugging in real data the layout start breaking apart, either because the content is too short, too long, or the designer didn't consider long usernames.<p>My dream for a filler content generator would be a large database of real content types, so you would have a list of real twitter handles, facebook names, blog post titles, world news articles and so on. You could then do stuff like h1 class="fixie worldnews title" or class="fixie twitter username".<p>Designers often argue that the purpose of Lorem Ipsum is to help the client focus on the look and not the content. I think this posture is wrong because you need the client thinking about content as early as posible.<p>Front-end developers also need the randomness of real world data to test the sturdiness of their layouts and account for edge cases as early as posible.
awesome. maybe an alternative api would be to allow for something like<p><pre><code> fixie.init([".array", "#of .selectors", ".that", ".should", "#be .populated .with .lorem"])
</code></pre>
or just a string like<p><pre><code> fixie.init(".string, #of .comma .separated .selectors, .that, .should, #be .populated .with .lorem")
</code></pre>
I think that would address the class proliferation issue and still be explicit about which dom nodes should be populated. easier to maintain / comment out.
This would be so much more awesome if you could assign the class to a container div. Then on each page reload it would randomly add content - be it paragraphs, headers, imgs, lists, tables etc.<p>This would be a fantastic tool for testing templates against a wide variety of random content. When making a template for clients to use you can never be too sure what they are going to add so you do your best to style everything. Getting random content on each page load would really solidify this testing.<p>Adding a class to individual elements... I don't find this too useful.
Depending on what browsers you're supports it's probably far easier to use generated content (:before, :after). Maybe combined with calc or CSS expressions.
Great idea!<p>I'd use this on client projects if:<p>- I could pass a selector rather than adjusting my markup (maybe I can add 'fixie' via jQuery?)<p>- There's an easy way to swap out the word list - I've had Bacon Ipsum, Hipster Ipsum, and Gangster Ipsum all slip through before and it's embarrassing (depending on the client).
Very cool. However, I don't particularly like the fact that I need to add a class to each applicable container.<p>Maybe a configuration file that allows for selection of specific classes/ids instead?
I don't this is a good idea. Because even if you want quick design but later you will have to fix them all. And nowadays designers are familiar with html ( the most basic skill ).
But it's nice btw
Thought this might be something like <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/MNFV8/1/" rel="nofollow">http://jsfiddle.net/MNFV8/1/</a> but I like the addition of the paragraph generators too.
This looks pretty cool. It would be a great companion to <a href="http://placehold.it" rel="nofollow">http://placehold.it</a> (which fills a similar role for images).