Gentoo Archives: www-redesign

From: Curtis Napier <curtis119@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o, www-redesign@l.g.o
Subject: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 06:41:11
Message-Id: 43840EED.2010909@gentoo.org
1 First of all, thank you everyone for all the feedback. Your input is
2 important and greatly appreciated.
3
4 I should have said that the last update was not complete as far as
5 design was concerned. I was mainly looking for accessibility and
6 rendering issues on as many browsers/OS's as possible. I got that
7 feedback and fixed the issues that came up. I also implemented the rest
8 of the design so it should now be more visually appealing and better
9 match Aarons reference design. I took into consideration all of the
10 suggestions that were submitted and now ask for additional feedback to
11 ensure that my changes didn't introduce any additional
12 rendering/accessibility bugs and that the design is acceptable to as
13 many people as possible.
14
15 If there are no more outstanding issues reported I will submit this
16 current layout for approval.
17
18
19 Questions to some of the answers and suggestions that were brought up:
20
21 The artwork is all part of the winning design. Any issues with the
22 infinity symbol should have been addressed a year ago.
23
24 I am not the designer of this site. I am merely implementing it in the
25 XSL backend. I am the only person working on this and I am the
26 designated official developer, the project lead is Swift and his role is
27 to offer advice, enforce design policy and generally oversee my actions
28 and help me with internal gentoo policies and procedures. The project is
29 actually owned by Infra and they (they == infra leads which is klieber
30 and ramereth as far as I know), along with Swift, have the final say on
31 everything. I welcome any and all patches that you are willing to
32 submit. All submissions will be evaluated on a case by case basis.
33
34 Aarons reference design at www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ is exactly that: A
35 reference. In it's current form it differs from his original submission
36 which was the winning entry and should not be considered as anything
37 else but a reference. I tried to stick to that design as much as
38 possible but some things were simply not possible.
39
40 Aarons design uses a smaller default font, that is not acceptable from
41 an accessibility POV. The main font is at 1em and all cursory fonts
42 multipliers of 1em. The main font will remain at 1em which is the
43 standard for the accessibility guidelines. If you don't like the
44 standard font size every single graphical browser offers a font zoom
45 capability, use it.
46
47 Aarons use of a smaller font allows more information to appear on the
48 page. This is an illusion of size. If you have your browser window set
49 to 800x600 or smaller the jumpads disappear and the page has to be
50 scrolled to see them no matter how big/small the font is. If you enlarge
51 the font on Aarons reference to the standard 1em the jumppads disappear
52 and the page must be scrolled anyway so this point is moot.
53
54 Purple background with yellow text is hideous. Not going to happen.
55
56 The "Locator" would require rewrites of not only the XSL but also the
57 actual xml files and is outside the scope of this project. Touching any
58 xml content file is strictly off limits, all existing xml should be
59 backwards compatible with the new design. This point is not debatable.
60 Use of a database would make this task easier while allowing backwards
61 compatibility but it will have to wait for a future update to the site
62 to be implemented.
63
64 I actually implemented a search that used google much like the example
65 that was posted here. The search was discussed at length with the
66 project lead and it was decided that using a third party search engine
67 such as google was unacceptable. As Lance said, this will have to be
68 coordinated with infra at a later date. Gentoo is a not-for-profit but,
69 unfortunetly, it is the wrong kind of non-profit so Google will not
70 sponsor us.
71
72 The contents of the uppermost menu are to sites that are outside the
73 www.gentoo.org website. They will stay in this location. They are green
74 to contrast with the purple background to ensure that colorblind and
75 other visually impaired people can see it. Green is the compliment to
76 purple so I am baffled that people think the combination is not
77 attractive. In Aarons preview the light purple color of these links is
78 not visible to color blind individuals thus it is unacceptable. This
79 color will not change.
80
81 The grey menu should contain links that would be used in order of a new
82 user and that highlight the main parts of the site. I did this quickly
83 to have something there to look at. I didn't notice any good suggestions
84 to replace what is there. If you have suggestions please send them. The
85 same goes for the wording in the purple boxes, if you don't like what
86 they say submit a suggestion for each. Suggestions of "I don't like it
87 you should change it" that don't include a clearly worded replacement
88 will be ignored. The donate box is here to stay until the search
89 function is implemented.
90
91 Graphics should be implemented in the CSS as much as possible to aid
92 future maintenance (the xsl templates are huge and not easy to maintain.
93 The least amount of editing of these files as possible is one of the
94 major goals). In text browsers that can handle graphics but don't
95 support CSS the upper left logo (which is a background image so it can
96 be put in the css) will not appear but will leave space for the missing
97 background image. I can't figure out a way around this. If you have a
98 suggestion I would appreciate it.
99
100 Horizontal scrolling of the entire page when a code listing is wider
101 than the page only happens in IE. All other browsers understand the CSS
102 scroll:auto tag and will only scroll the actual code listing. The same
103 applies to inline images within the page contents. IE is broken but I
104 did everything I could to make it behave the same as other browsers.
105 This is one issue that IE is simply broken on and there is nothing I can
106 do to fix that. Javascript fixes are available but the use of Javascript
107 is strictly forbidden. Javascript is not debatable.
108
109 Redundant links to important pages such as the Handbook and Documention
110 only serve to make them easier for a user to locate. They will remain
111 for the time being unless someone can come up with a good reason to
112 remove them other than "I don't like it".
113
114 The <hr /> tags in the Handbook navigation are contained within the
115 handbook xsl template. Touching that file is outside my scope.
116
117 The redesign test site is not a full mirror. I added the security index
118 page so we could see what it looks like.
119
120 The site is not XHTML it is HTML-4.01 Transitional and it passes the w3c
121 validator. Manually overriding HTML-4.01 Transitional in the w3c
122 validator is not required and any errors that it reports if you do this
123 will not be addressed. If you can come up with a good technical reason
124 why doing this would benefit anyone I will address it.
125
126 Navigation and useability studies are beyond my scope. These issues
127 should have been addressed a year ago.
128
129 The left hand navigation column is dead. No amount of beating this dead
130 horse will resurrect it. The jumppads will remain at the bottom and
131 appear on all non-documentation pages so that those links are accessible
132 as much as possible.
133
134 <base href> is not needed for this site to function properly. If you
135 want to save the page locally you are free to do so and add the tag
136 yourself for your local copy.
137
138 The CSS is only 12k. Why would shaving 4k off of it to make it 8k make a
139 difference to anyone?
140
141 The site is dynamically generated with XSL/XML all the pages end in
142 .xml. There are no plans to change it to .xhtml now or in the future.
143
144 The image on the about page is within the content xml file and not
145 within the XSL template. Touching about.xml or any other xml content
146 file is outside my scope.
147
148 GLEP 10 is outside my scope.
149
150 The jumppads have alt text. They always have. They pop up as tool tips
151 on every browser I have tested. If they aren't for you please submit
152 your browser version and OS and I will look into it.
153
154 The blue text that represents code was darkened for accessibility
155 issues. It will not change.
156
157 In Aarons preview the search box and the ads column are placed with a
158 Position:absolute and has it's size set. At resolutions below 800x600
159 this makes the ads overlap the content and the search box overlap the
160 box to the left on every browser. When content is scarce the ads overlap
161 the footer. This is not fixable given the current state of css support
162 in the various browsers. After many many many long hours of research and
163 experimentation I decided that we would have to resort to a table for
164 the ads column and include the search (now donate) box within the div
165 that contains the four purple boxes with a % width to fix this issue. I
166 lowered the % width of the donate box and increased the others to bring
167 it more inline with Aarons original design. It's not perfect but it's
168 close enough.
169
170 Accessibilty guidelines say that all text links should be underlined. I
171 made an exception for the grey menu bar for aesthetic purposes but will
172 not make an exception for any other links.
173
174 gentoo.org and all domains owned by the Gentoo Foundation should render
175 correctly in all browsers that are still in general use. IE5 on the mac
176 is still a valid browser and will be supported as much as possible.
177
178 Summary and authors are important and should be prominently displayed
179 before the actual content. On the current design they are on the right
180 in a tiny column that wraps every two words. This is unacceptable. These
181 items will stay at the top for now unless someone can come up with a
182 place to put them that makes sense, looks good, allows the summary to be
183 seen on top and not below the content (because a summary should be above
184 the content otherwise why have a summary if you have to scroll past the
185 content to see it?). The handbook is the only page that has a large list
186 of authors and authors only appear on the first page so this should not
187 be a problem.
188
189
190
191 Here is a list of items that have changed since my last post:
192
193 *menu code was changed from a floated block list to a simple inline div
194 with non-breaking spaces. This should fix the IE5 on Mac issue.
195
196 *Background color for content was made light grey with black text for
197 better visibility of the text. Bright monitors should no longer be a
198 problem.
199
200 *background color of the ads was made darker to contrast with the
201 content area. Decorative header was added.
202
203 *white space was collapsed as much as possible.
204
205 *all extraneous information and decorative news headers were removed
206 from the front page to help readability and to bring focus to the
207 information. This includes the cow image and text. Overwhelming amounts
208 of information on the front page should no longer be a problem. This
209 also brings the jumppads closer to the top so new users will be better
210 able to spot them.
211
212 *table headers were centered and data cells left justified.
213
214 *table borders are now collapsed and only 1px thick. They are no longer
215 ugly.
216
217 *removed the BOLD from the design credit in the footer. This wasn't
218 supposed to be BOLD in the first place, probably a mistake on my part.
219
220 *The purple boxes below the grey menu bar now only appear on the main index.
221
222 *news poster date and submitter color changed to match Aarons design
223
224 *added a filter that removes the author and date if they are missing or
225 script generated.
226
227 *removed redundant doc title
228
229 *removed the donation button image and replaced it with a simple button.
230 --
231 www-redesign@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org mushroomblue <mushroomblue@××××××××××.net>
RE: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org Aaron Shi <aaron@××××××××.com>
Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org "Christopher Bergström" <cbergstrom@×××××××××.com>