Gentoo Archives: www-redesign

From: Grant Goodyear <g2boojum@g.o>
To: www-redesign@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [www-redesign] Progress update
Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 15:08:29
Message-Id: 20050504150933.GG573@bmb24.uth.tmc.edu
In Reply to: Re: [www-redesign] Progress update by Blackace
1 Blackace wrote: [Wed May 04 2005, 12:01:57AM CDT]
2 > On your guide page, I really feel like the author list would be better
3 > off in the right bar, since for the handbook for instance, the list is
4 > going to get really long.
5
6 I actually like the author list at the top, but to make it reasonable it
7 would need to list the authors as
8 Joe Buck (Author), Homer Simpson (Editor), ...
9 instead of using one line per entry. Of course, I might change my mind
10 if I actually saw an example w/ the authors from the Handbook.
11
12 > In addition, the drop down in the top bar seems out of place, perhaps it
13 > would better left aligned in line with the font size adjustment, e-mail,
14 > and print buttons. I do like the buttons though, especially the print
15 > one to link to our ?style=printable, but the e-mail one is probably
16 > unnecessary since we don't have it now, I doubt people would use it
17 > much, and we'd have to implement a script and form behind it, exposing
18 > ourselves to people using it to use our servers to spam people.
19
20 I agree about the e-mail link, but I rather like the drop-down bar where
21 it is, since it seems reasonable to me that the drop down be part of the
22 location bread-crumbs. *Shrug*
23
24 > I think the links in the content of the guide page would be better with
25 > solid underlines vs. dotted, since dotted usually implies contextual
26 > help or a "tool tip" which explains an acronym, and the dotted underline
27 > seems to disappear in that much text.
28 >
29 > The background color on <c> and <i> elements is also much too faint, I
30 > would either bolden it up a little or just leave it out, as a matter of
31 > fact the body text seems a little too faint as well.
32
33 Reasonable criticisms.
34
35 > The tables I like very much, but the code listings and warnings just
36 > seem very out of place, colors mostly...for the code listing the green
37 > you use in chapter headings would look better, and I just don't like the
38 > single line on the left, it seems like it's supposed to be an editor's
39 > note or markup more than part of the document, maybe a similar style as
40 > the tables, except a green header row, light blue background would look
41 > better...as for notes and warnings, I'd go with a dotted border like
42 > your author/document info box at the top has, and a light pastel colored
43 > background keyed to what it is, purple for notes, red for warnings, etc.
44 > And on the printable page, I'd drop the light background on the code
45 > listings and everything else like you do for the tables.
46
47 I actually really like the code listings and the warnings. That said, I
48 don't at all like the vertical scroll bar on the code listings. (I
49 absolutely loathe the horizontal scroll bar, since it's extremely rare
50 that the 80-character limit for <pre></pre> blocks needs to be
51 violated, but that's a different issue.)
52
53 > Part of that is the top bar once we leave the main index page, on your
54 > guide page you show it containing bread crumb style navigation...I had
55 > hoped we could use that space for secondary navigation that all our top
56 > level apps will need, like forums, bugs, and packages...and archives
57 > would benefit from it too.
58
59 An example might be helpful.
60
61 So, how far are we from being able to process the whole doc tree to
62 create a full test version of the new site? I'd love to have a
63 not-published version on one of the infra boxes that we can use to
64 really get a feel for how navigation is going to work.
65
66 -g2boojum-
67 --
68 Grant Goodyear
69 Gentoo Developer
70 g2boojum@g.o
71 http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
72 GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76