[www-redesign] Comments on Gentoo redesign

[Xavier Neys]

Hi all,

What follows may seem like a long list of rants.
Please do not take it the wrong end, it's all for a good cause.
Besides, it's difficult to know which page you're supposed to comment on at
the moment. Some issues might have been solved by now.
BTW, I still haven't looked at the html/css code.

>>> To address the issue of font sizes, I've implemented a font size
>>> changer on
>>> the content pages.  The user could increase/decrease the content font
>>> size
>>> and the changes are saved into a cookie so that it will apply site
>>> wide.  I
>>> think this give users flexibility without compromising the layout of the
>>> pages.  Without this system, the user would use his browser to
>>> increase font
>>> size. The browser would increase all the fonts...making the
>>> navigation bar
>>> (and other) fonts extremely out of proporation
>>>
> That sort of works in most cases.
> But what happens if a user don't have eg JS or cookies turn on (for
> security/preference/whatever reasons)? The browser default setting is
> already applied site wide without any extra magic that may or may not work.

> In the days of a CRT doinated world it was pretty safe to make
> assumtions about users fontsizes, you couldn't go too wrong if it was
> readable to yourself. But nowdays there are really tiny LCDs with HUGE
> resolutions of 1280 or more. In a world where a user on a 14" monitor
> might be using anything from 640 to 1600 res, all bets are off. That is
> why I belive it's a better design principle to simply let go of textsize
> control and concentrate on making a design highly resilient to whatever
> fontsize is thrown at it.

Exactly.
FYI, I use 2 CRTs (19" and 17") both at 1600x1200 and don't consider it huge
at all. 2nd hand 21" CRTs that do 1920x1440 now sell for about 100 euros.

The font control on the page is not a good idea.
Browsers already have such a functionality.
On the one hand, if users blow up their fonts beyond anything reasonable, it's
their problem.
On the other hand, the current design does not react properly to font
increases. A slight increase makes the text in the top navigation grow out of
the bar. Same goes for the line with the chapter index combo. The navigation
pads at the bottom grow beyond the footer which does not appear at the bottom
anymore.

"Advertisements" is always under its green triangle, no matter how small the
fonts. It usually appears in the grey area, at least partly.

About those green triangles, I hope they'll be added by the css and not be
part of the html.

Slight indentation is very annoying to say the least.

Credits should either appear in the right column or after the text. They just
don't fit in the nice floating box with the abstract and date.
Another option might be to group them by title.

Please do not assume some text will always be as short as you think.
For instance, displaying a date in a narrow column is a bad idea. Some will be
wider than you think (different languages, different formats,
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp/tests/testdate.xml).

Still to be shown:
  <pre> with <comments>, <i> and normal text
  <impo> <warn> <note> elements
  Handbook pages with their nav bar
  Properly padded tables and please keep in mind that <ti> can contain <note>

BTW, I agree that using tables for the layout should be avoided but using
tables to show tabular data is exactly what they were meant for in the first
place. We have plenty of them and they stay.

Origin and rights of the pictures need to be established.


Many thanks to all who work hard on the www-redesign project.

Cheers,
--
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/  French & Internationalisation Lead
\  http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
/\