Re: [www-redesign] Progress update

[Blackace]

On Tue, 2005-05-03 at 17:57 -0700, Aaron Shi wrote:
> Is there a "master list" of all the CSS formatting required? I.e.
> code, path, input, code listing, etc. etc.  while the Guide Page
> seemed to cover a lot of stuff, I'm sure it doesn't have everything.
> It appears that code and input has the same formatting/colors (namely
> blue monospaced font) in the current setup, it seems a bit ambiguous
> to me.  Any thoughts?  What do you guys think about having line
> numbers appear on the side of the code listings?  Usually I'd put
> something like that for long snippets of code, but here it seems to be
> commands and console output less than a few lines long so it's
> probably not useful...

The DTDs should contain all the elements we currently have, and you can
correlate them to CSS by checking the XSL, sorry but other than the
xml-guide which may not explain everything, that's the best way to find
out, if you have any questions or want any help with XSL/XML stuff,
please e-mail me or jump on irc and grab me, blackace in #gentoo, -dev,
-infra, -doc, or just PM me, I'm usually on :)

Now for comments aka destructive criticism ;)

On your guide page, I really feel like the author list would be better
off in the right bar, since for the handbook for instance, the list is
going to get really long.

In addition, the drop down in the top bar seems out of place, perhaps it
would better left aligned in line with the font size adjustment, e-mail,
and print buttons.  I do like the buttons though, especially the print
one to link to our ?style=printable, but the e-mail one is probably
unnecessary since we don't have it now, I doubt people would use it
much, and we'd have to implement a script and form behind it, exposing
ourselves to people using it to use our servers to spam people.

I think the links in the content of the guide page would be better with
solid underlines vs. dotted, since dotted usually implies contextual
help or a "tool tip" which explains an acronym, and the dotted underline
seems to disappear in that much text.

The background color on <c> and <i> elements is also much too faint, I
would either bolden it up a little or just leave it out, as a matter of
fact the body text seems a little too faint as well.

The tables I like very much, but the code listings and warnings just
seem very out of place, colors mostly...for the code listing the green
you use in chapter headings would look better, and I just don't like the
single line on the left, it seems like it's supposed to be an editor's
note or markup more than part of the document, maybe a similar style as
the tables, except a green header row, light blue background would look
better...as for notes and warnings, I'd go with a dotted border like
your author/document info box at the top has, and a light pastel colored
background keyed to what it is, purple for notes, red for warnings, etc.
And on the printable page, I'd drop the light background on the code
listings and everything else like you do for the tables.

In the top bar, I'd align the background of the search form cell to the
top so when the bar gets shorter the position of the content relative to
the image in the background doesn't change.

Since the top bar will get shorter, aligning the content of the search
form cell to the top with maybe an 8-10 pixel margin would keep it from
moving around, and that bar could use to be shorter in your guide page
as the amount of air around the text to the left of the search form
looks kind of odd.

We should also plan for more content in that search form cell, for
instance archives.g.o will need different text and a drop down to select
which list to search, packages.g.o will have different needs as well, as
will forums...one of my goals during this redesign is to abstract the
layout and design sufficiently from the content so as to allow different
global content alongside local content for each of our sites/top level
apps.

Part of that is the top bar once we leave the main index page, on your
guide page you show it containing bread crumb style navigation...I had
hoped we could use that space for secondary navigation that all our top
level apps will need, like forums, bugs, and packages...and archives
would benefit from it too.

Also in the top bar, in your main page, I was wondering if we could
change the Manage, Customize, Optimize, Interact, and Search to be
text...I can provide a patch to the code and the css if you want.
They're just another 1,902 bytes that have kind of a rough dark edged
transparency and look better as text, nearly identical when the primary
font is the same, Arial.

The "More Headlines" page seems a little redundant, if you want to see
more than the last couple on the main page, we might as well display the
entire list in a more condensed format, say, per month or something.

On your "jump pads" at the bottom of the main page, I don't really like
them all that much to be honest since the visitor should be able to
easily access everything listed in them from our primary navigation in
less than 3 (probably 2) clicks otherwise we've failed to make the site
usable, and they only exist to be used as a crutch...but regardless, I
liked them better when they were centered in the content area of the
page, and in your Documentation one, s/other cocs/other docs/ :)

Hopefully my critique hasn't pissed you off too much, but dancing around
what I think would only delay the first instance of me pissing you off,
and would prevent whatever useful thoughts I have on it from being made
known, err well, hopefully there are some in there :)

Once again, you can almost always grab me on IRC if you want help with
any of our XSL stuff, or want to discuss anything :)

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer