[www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

This has been cross posted to gentoo-dev and www-redesign.

http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

After receiving a ton of very useful feedback from the developer 
community I have updated the redesign. It should now be closer to 100% 
accessible and it should (hopefully) render perfectly in all browsers 
including text only browsers. It now passes XHTML and CSS validation tests.

I'm asking for everyone (developers and users alike) to please have a 
look at the updated site and send any feedback you may have. I'm 
especially interested in feedback from anyone who uses accessibilty 
programs such as screen readers or if you are color blind or have any 
other accessibilty issues.

Also, I only use GNU/Linux and I have only tested on the following browsers:

Mozilla-1.7
firefox-1.0
Opera-8.5
Internet Explorer-6 under CrossOver Office
Epiphany-1.8.2
Links-2.1 in text mode and graphics mode.

If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or 
Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser version 
in your feedback. I haven't received feedback from Konqueror or Safari 
so feedback from those browsers would be much appreciated.

The only major outstanding issue is the contents of the menu in the grey 
bar at the top and what should appear in the 5 purple boxes directly 
under them. Currently I have that menu listed in order of what a new 
Gentoo user would need to access first. If you have a better idea of 
what should be included in this menu or think something important is 
being left out please send that in your feedback as well.

Thanks in advance

Curtis
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Energytwister]

> If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or  
> Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser  
> version in your feedback. I haven't received feedback from  
> Konqueror or Safari so feedback from those browsers would be much  
> appreciated.

I am using a Powerbook G4 running with Mac OS X 10.4.3 (Tiger) and  
Safari Version 2.0.2 (416.12).

The site looks just fine with the exception of a lot of unnecessary  
whitespace between the header and
the cow logo where it reads "We produce Gentoo...".

A similar amount of "seems-out-of-place"-whitespace is visible  
between the "Older News"-link and the
three icons for "Documentation" "Resources' "Community".

I also checked the site with Firefox 1.0.7 on my Mac. It displays the  
same whitespace. Perhaps this is
intended after all? If it indeed is intended you might want to think  
about it, seems like a lot of wasted
space to me.

I could post a screenshot if anyone wants one.

Thanks for your time,
Patrick
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Blackace]

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On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 08:51 +0100, Energytwister wrote:
> > If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or  
> > Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser  
> > version in your feedback. I haven't received feedback from  
> > Konqueror or Safari so feedback from those browsers would be much  
> > appreciated.
> 
> I am using a Powerbook G4 running with Mac OS X 10.4.3 (Tiger) and  
> Safari Version 2.0.2 (416.12).
> 
> The site looks just fine with the exception of a lot of unnecessary  
> whitespace between the header and
> the cow logo where it reads "We produce Gentoo...".
> 
> A similar amount of "seems-out-of-place"-whitespace is visible  
> between the "Older News"-link and the
> three icons for "Documentation" "Resources' "Community".

I also see this whitespace in Linux with Galeon, and I agree it seems
out of place and could use to be tightened up.

Another issue is the line spacing on the last line of authors in docs is
greater than the rest.

I'm a little unsure that the links in the upper right should be all
caps...looks kinda odd.

If the "Make a Donation" graphic is going to be in the donate div then
having "Donation" bold is redundant and misleading as it isn't
clickable, and the Make a Donation graphic needs it's transparency
worked on.

Whitespace is needed between "> What's New" and the line before the news
items...color separation would look better than the horizontal lines
that currently separate news items.

On some pages, http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml for
one...the ads on the right become spaced out from the right hand side
instead of being consistently aligned.

On http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml the subsections could
use some whitespace between them, ie. between the "Installation Guides"
section of links and the "Other Installation Related Documentation" list
of links.

http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml scrolls horizontally
probably due to the fig's overflow.

Increasing the line spacing could be good, since lists of links
currently look very crowded due to their underlines being 1 pixel from
the top of the next line's text.

On docs, the "Printer-friendly" graphic needs to be vertically centered
on the text to it's left, or alternately could be right aligned so it is
in the top-right of the page.

On pages where the ads are longer than the content to their left, the
content is vertically aligned middle, it needs to be vertically aligned
top.

On docs, tables have a 2px border, which seems too heavy/thick...a 1px
white border could look good, just denoting separation of the cells.

It would be good if there was a way to restrict the width of notes/warns
since on
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=3 they cause the page to scroll horizontally, when they could instead just wrap their contents...only code listings should be kept from being wrapped.

The lines that flank the nav elements in the handbook seem too heavy as
well...maybe 1px solid or dotted would look better?  or maybe no lines?

And I'm not sure what's happening with dates in the GWN index, but they
have extra newlines in them causing them to look rather odd.

And I take it the glsa index stuff
(http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/security/en/index.xml) hasn't been
implemented for the wwwredesign site?

That's it for now, Curtis, I hope you don't see my comments as critical
or demanding, they are just suggestions/my personal opinions...I'm very
impressed with how much work you've done, and I'd like to thank you for
keeping the redesign alive, if it weren't for you it would've died and
been forgotten :)

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Christopher Bergström]

Curtis Napier wrote:

> This has been cross posted to gentoo-dev and www-redesign.
>
> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
>
> After receiving a ton of very useful feedback from the developer
> community I have updated the redesign. It should now be closer to 100%
> accessible and it should (hopefully) render perfectly in all browsers
> including text only browsers. It now passes XHTML and CSS validation
> tests.

The doctype is currently HTML 4.01 Transitional and manually overriding
to XHTML doesn't validate.. (Looking at the source shows that it's
simple fixes though.)

>
> If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or
> Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser
> version in your feedback. I haven't received feedback from Konqueror
> or Safari so feedback from those browsers would be much appreciated.
>
If you'd like to preview future sites for Mac.. (Try PearPC)

> The only major outstanding issue is the contents of the menu in the
> grey bar at the top and what should appear in the 5 purple boxes
> directly under them. Currently I have that menu listed in order of
> what a new Gentoo user would need to access first. If you have a
> better idea of what should be included in this menu or think something
> important is being left out please send that in your feedback as well.
>
Usability and navigation needs work.  Think in terms of end user..
Someone may not land on the home page.. At which point he will have to
navigate to where he/she needs to get as quickly as possible.  With
click-through patterns (If you can get the data) see where people are
going and make that most accessible..  Navigation should be fairly site
standard and potentially even show a hierarchy of where they are in the
site. (ie Home > Solutions > etc)
Do we have this data? Is now the time to do a structure change to allow
for faster digging?

(Not exactly related to the redesign, but is the site content index or
in a database at all.. How could we maybe allow for a site/doc search?)

I've looked at the preview images for the winning contest.. Is it too
late to consider moving the three navigation boxes to the left hand side
and or keeping some of the left hand navigation there..

Link color contrast for the top right isn't very clear.. (Doesn't match
the preview image.)

Why change from the preview image to adding in it's place the four
navigation boxes?

While we are an open source project there are still two very desirable
actions we want users to do..

1) Download and try the software (Rename mirrors and get gentoo to
Download and make it very clear where users can download from.)
2) Make a donation (this should also be something more than a standard
PayPal button, but still discrete and site blended.)

Dummy proof and use standard terms for the actions we want users to
do..  The perfect example, but more than slightly overkill/hard sell is..
http://uk.real.com/realmusic/
(I do think the preview image you submitted was very close on target,
but maybe with a bigger click here or arrow..)

Possible to get the CSS page under 8k?

btw.. Is there any particular reason the current site pages end in .xml,
but are actually just html docs? (Do we plan to use xhtml at least in
the future?)

Cheers,

C.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Aaron Shi]

First of all, kudos to Curtis and team.  This is definitely a step up from
last time I checked.  While I don't always agree with what's done, I do very
much appreciate and respect all the effort that's put in.

Here goes the comments... I'm just going to add to the discussion rather
than starting from the beginning.

> Usability and navigation needs work.  Think in terms of end user..
> Someone may not land on the home page.. At which point he 
> will have to navigate to where he/she needs to get as quickly 
> as possible.  With click-through patterns (If you can get the 
> data) see where people are going and make that most 
> accessible..  Navigation should be fairly site standard and 
> potentially even show a hierarchy of where they are in the 
> site. (ie Home > Solutions > etc) Do we have this data? Is 
> now the time to do a structure change to allow for faster digging?

I've been stressing these points since day one, finally someone gets it!  If
we don't enhance the underlying design of the site (i.e. the "substance") in
order to remedy some of the problems with the old design, the redesign would
more appropriately be called a "face lift."  I don't know what actually goes
under the hood with all the xml etc., but to me, as it appears, it's simply
a face lift.  The functionality hasn't changed one bit.  Navigation is still
a nightmare.  On a site as complex as Gentoo's, users -- especially those
new to Gentoo (who also happens to be those who are critical to the growth
of Gentoo) -- will be easily lost.  They will have a hard time finding the
information which they seek to make their decision to use Gentoo or to make
their Gentoo experience successful.

In hindsight, I realized that the project didn't have (I couldn't find) a
clearly defined strategy (What is it trying to do? To achieve? And why?
What's the ultimate goal?) and corresponding sets of concrete and achievable
objectives that feeds into the strategy to make it work.

When I started the project, I aimed for 3 things 1) to make a solid
impression on visitors of the site in order to convey the values and
benefits of Gentoo, i.e. in order to gain new users, 2) to make the site a
pleasure to browse (for existing and new users), and 3) to make information
easy to access.  Graphics and eye-candy (if you will) along with
strategically placed (and clearly/easily identified) critical "Gentoo
elements" helps to achieve 1).  2) and 3) relates to usability (how
efficiently and effectively a user can do what they want to do), navigation
(how easily can a user move through the structure of the site, not simply
linearly as non-linear navigation is what makes moving quick), and "flow"
(how intuitive and logical is the structure of the site and the information
presented).

Now it seems that these goals were too ambitious given our limited
resources.  However, we seem to be taking baby steps toward them, which is a
good thing.

> I've looked at the preview images for the winning contest.. 
> Is it too late to consider moving the three navigation boxes 
> to the left hand side and or keeping some of the left hand 
> navigation there..

Christopher, we've gone a ways since the preview images. A newer proof of
concept / early prototype is here: http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/

> While we are an open source project there are still two very 
> desirable actions we want users to do..
> 
> 1) Download and try the software (Rename mirrors and get 
> gentoo to Download and make it very clear where users can 
> download from.)
> 2) Make a donation (this should also be something more than a 
> standard PayPal button, but still discrete and site blended.)

Agree with both objectives in the general sense.  The donation objective
never occurred to me, but it's a very neat idea since Gentoo is an NPO and
suffice to say it doesn't sit on a mountain of cash so any extra funding is
probably a positive thing.

Quirks:
- The front page news area seems really out of character (the lines, the
styles, the indentation, etc. seems "off")
- General spacing is messed up, i.e. lots of white space where there
shouldn't be
- Table borders don't quite fit into the theme
- I thought the 3 jump pads are only supposed to appear on the front page?

I don't think the bolding or whiter shade is necessary for my credits at the
bottom.  Thanks for thought though, but such credits should be as
unobtrusive as possible so that users can better focus their attention
elsewhere on what's important.  It's probably better left as before --
unbold, dark shade of purple (see bottom of
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html).


Aaron




-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Christopher Bergström]

Aaron Shi wrote:

>First of all, kudos to Curtis and team.  This is definitely a step up from
>last time I checked.  While I don't always agree with what's done, I do very
>much appreciate and respect all the effort that's put in.
>  
>
I'd also like to say that this is VERY much appreciated and while I'm 
void of tact I really don't want to come across as critical. 
Thanks in advance for the nice work.

>Here goes the comments... I'm just going to add to the discussion rather
>than starting from the beginning.
>
>  
>
>>Usability and navigation needs work.  Think in terms of end user..
>>Someone may not land on the home page.. At which point he 
>>will have to navigate to where he/she needs to get as quickly 
>>as possible.  With click-through patterns (If you can get the 
>>data) see where people are going and make that most 
>>accessible..  Navigation should be fairly site standard and 
>>potentially even show a hierarchy of where they are in the 
>>site. (ie Home > Solutions > etc) Do we have this data? Is 
>>now the time to do a structure change to allow for faster digging?
>>    
>>
>
>I've been stressing these points since day one, finally someone gets it!  If
>we don't enhance the underlying design of the site (i.e. the "substance") in
>order to remedy some of the problems with the old design, the redesign would
>more appropriately be called a "face lift."  I don't know what actually goes
>under the hood with all the xml etc., but to me, as it appears, it's simply
>a face lift.  The functionality hasn't changed one bit.  Navigation is still
>a nightmare.  On a site as complex as Gentoo's, users -- especially those
>new to Gentoo (who also happens to be those who are critical to the growth
>of Gentoo) -- will be easily lost.  They will have a hard time finding the
>information which they seek to make their decision to use Gentoo or to make
>their Gentoo experience successful.
>
>In hindsight, I realized that the project didn't have (I couldn't find) a
>clearly defined strategy (What is it trying to do? To achieve? And why?
>What's the ultimate goal?) and corresponding sets of concrete and achievable
>objectives that feeds into the strategy to make it work.
>
>When I started the project, I aimed for 3 things 
>

>1) to make a solid
>impression on visitors of the site in order to convey the values and
>benefits of Gentoo, i.e. in order to gain new users, 
>
This could be accomplished by a multitude of things which add up.. 
(Inside a trademark yet to be established, user experience quotes, and 
mission statement page which has direct top level links.

>2) to make the site a
>pleasure to browse (for existing and new users), and 
>
We'd have to get feedback about how it's not currently pleasant in order 
to "fix" this.

>3) to make information
>easy to access.  
>
This is critical...

>Graphics and eye-candy (if you will) along with
>strategically placed (and clearly/easily identified) critical "Gentoo
>elements" helps to achieve 1).  2) and 3) relates to usability (how
>efficiently and effectively a user can do what they want to do), navigation
>(how easily can a user move through the structure of the site, not simply
>linearly as non-linear navigation is what makes moving quick), and "flow"
>(how intuitive and logical is the structure of the site and the information
>presented).
>
>Now it seems that these goals were too ambitious given our limited
>resources.  However, we seem to be taking baby steps toward them, which is a
>good thing.
>
>  
>
>>I've looked at the preview images for the winning contest.. 
>>Is it too late to consider moving the three navigation boxes 
>>to the left hand side and or keeping some of the left hand 
>>navigation there..
>>    
>>
>
>Christopher, we've gone a ways since the preview images. A newer proof of
>concept / early prototype is here: http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/
>
>  
>
I'll stand corrected on one thing..  Seems I should be asking for the 
navigation on the right.. Not the entire menu, but some? Maybe above the 
ads section? This also wouldn't take up more horizontal space.

http://usability.gov/guidelines/

>>While we are an open source project there are still two very 
>>desirable actions we want users to do..
>>
>>1) Download and try the software (Rename mirrors and get 
>>gentoo to Download and make it very clear where users can 
>>download from.)
>>2) Make a donation (this should also be something more than a 
>>standard PayPal button, but still discrete and site blended.)
>>    
>>
>
>Agree with both objectives in the general sense.  The donation objective
>never occurred to me, but it's a very neat idea since Gentoo is an NPO and
>suffice to say it doesn't sit on a mountain of cash so any extra funding is
>probably a positive thing.
>  
>
I should see if I can find my contact for the Mozilla project.. The guys 
over there are doing a really nice job of having users do their desired 
actions... (Think front page of NY times..)(Save some typing 
http://www.mozilla.org/) While I'm not saying to oversell.. I'm saying 
it is possible to do thing which will help drive click patterns and 
actions to what we want.

>Quirks:
>- The front page news area seems really out of character (the lines, the
>styles, the indentation, etc. seems "off")
>  
>
I think the feel for the home page would entirely change if we could 
trade those four boxes with one big stylish and clear/concise box saying 
something along the lines of (Download Gentoo now)

>- General spacing is messed up, i.e. lots of white space where there
>shouldn't be
>- Table borders don't quite fit into the theme
>- I thought the 3 jump pads are only supposed to appear on the front page?
>
>I don't think the bolding or whiter shade is necessary for my credits at the
>bottom.  Thanks for thought though, but such credits should be as
>unobtrusive as possible so that users can better focus their attention
>elsewhere on what's important.  It's probably better left as before --
>unbold, dark shade of purple (see bottom of
>http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html).
>  
>
<http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepageprint.html>
Please leave the background of the search box white and a try for higher 
contrast of font colors.

You also may be surprised with how many people override default site 
font sizes. It's safer to not use pixels when defining font sizes..  
http://usability.gov/guidelines/fonts.html#one (It specifically mentions 
those over 65, but in general has been a thing I've heard more than once 
from even younger people.)
<http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepageprint.html>
I've only been using one reference source for credibility, but if anyone 
wants a lot of reading material I'd be happy to send over what I have.  
(Lastly and certainly outside the scope of one email.. Do we care about 
SEO?  With such a busy project has their ever been any thought about 
marketing? I'm not talking about selling Gentoo, but something similar 
to Moz project.) Just send me a private email for anything off topic.

I hope this information is helpful/valuable in some way...

Thanks again

C.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Monday 21 November 2005 12:27, Aaron Shi wrote:
> I've been stressing these points since day one, finally someone gets
> it!  If we don't enhance the underlying design of the site (i.e. the
> "substance") in order to remedy some of the problems with the old
> design, the redesign would more appropriately be called a "face lift." 
> I don't know what actually goes under the hood with all the xml etc.,
> but to me, as it appears, it's simply a face lift.  The functionality
> hasn't changed one bit.  Navigation is still a nightmare.  On a site as
> complex as Gentoo's, users -- especially those new to Gentoo (who also
> happens to be those who are critical to the growth of Gentoo) -- will
> be easily lost.  They will have a hard time finding the information
> which they seek to make their decision to use Gentoo or to make their
> Gentoo experience successful.

I agree with you too. Especially the homepage is too full. Please look at 
what could be moved, done different etc. Of course the information should 
still be reachable, but how it is reachable should be improved.
> Christopher, we've gone a ways since the preview images. A newer proof
> of concept / early prototype is here: http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/

Looks great. Unfortunately I don't have the time, but else I'd help to get 
the current wwwredesign.g.o more into that direction. Including 
redesigning the contents and xml structure.

> Quirks:
> - The front page news area seems really out of character (the lines,
> the styles, the indentation, etc. seems "off")
> - General spacing is messed up, i.e. lots of white space where there
> shouldn't be

100% agreed

> - Table borders don't quite fit into the theme

Yeah, http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/proj/en looks awfull

> - I thought the 3 jump pads are only supposed to appear on the front
> page?

Probably looks better, especially when the news area doesn't push it 
offscreen.

> I don't think the bolding or whiter shade is necessary for my credits
> at the bottom.  Thanks for thought though, but such credits should be
> as unobtrusive as possible so that users can better focus their
> attention elsewhere on what's important.  It's probably better left as
> before -- unbold, dark shade of purple (see bottom of
> http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html).

Indeed ;-)

Paul

ps. On your page, I find the XHTML and CSS links to the verifiers 
confusing. Better just leave them out.

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Christopher Bergström]

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Blackace]

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On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 10:39 +0200, Christopher Bergström wrote:
> Usability and navigation needs work.  Think in terms of end user..
> Someone may not land on the home page.. At which point he will have to
> navigate to where he/she needs to get as quickly as possible.  With
> click-through patterns (If you can get the data) see where people are
> going and make that most accessible..  Navigation should be fairly site
> standard and potentially even show a hierarchy of where they are in the
> site. (ie Home > Solutions > etc)
> Do we have this data? Is now the time to do a structure change to allow
> for faster digging?

Now is probably not the time, no, structure changes will likely take
place after this first part of the redesign is implemented.

> (Not exactly related to the redesign, but is the site content index or
> in a database at all.. How could we maybe allow for a site/doc search?)

Also planned.

> I've looked at the preview images for the winning contest.. Is it too
> late to consider moving the three navigation boxes to the left hand side
> and or keeping some of the left hand navigation there..

In my opinion, adding nav to the left side would take too much
horizontal real estate.

> Possible to get the CSS page under 8k?

Why?  the css should be cached by the useragent and therefore will only
be transferred once.

> btw.. Is there any particular reason the current site pages end in .xml,
> but are actually just html docs? (Do we plan to use xhtml at least in
> the future?)

Yes, the underlying data is xml...the .xml files are being transformed
to html/xhtml server-side using xslt.

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Daniel Wahlgren]

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Looks fine in Firefox 1.5 RC2 on Windows XP.
Looks fine in IE 6.0 on Windows XP.

One thing that feels odd is the Big Flashy Button Things ("Portage 
<http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=1>: 
an easy to use world-class package management solution.", " Over 8,000 
packages <http://packages.gentoo.org> + in-depth documentation 
<http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml> = unlimited potential." 
etc) does not apear on every page. I understand they take space, but it 
looks odd.

Very good, and keep up the good work!
/Daniel Wahlgren
Aridhol

Curtis Napier wrote:
> This has been cross posted to gentoo-dev and www-redesign.
>
> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
>
> After receiving a ton of very useful feedback from the developer 
> community I have updated the redesign. It should now be closer to 100% 
> accessible and it should (hopefully) render perfectly in all browsers 
> including text only browsers. It now passes XHTML and CSS validation 
> tests.
>
> I'm asking for everyone (developers and users alike) to please have a 
> look at the updated site and send any feedback you may have. I'm 
> especially interested in feedback from anyone who uses accessibilty 
> programs such as screen readers or if you are color blind or have any 
> other accessibilty issues.
>
> Also, I only use GNU/Linux and I have only tested on the following 
> browsers:
>
> Mozilla-1.7
> firefox-1.0
> Opera-8.5
> Internet Explorer-6 under CrossOver Office
> Epiphany-1.8.2
> Links-2.1 in text mode and graphics mode.
>
> If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or 
> Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser 
> version in your feedback. I haven't received feedback from Konqueror 
> or Safari so feedback from those browsers would be much appreciated.
>
> The only major outstanding issue is the contents of the menu in the 
> grey bar at the top and what should appear in the 5 purple boxes 
> directly under them. Currently I have that menu listed in order of 
> what a new Gentoo user would need to access first. If you have a 
> better idea of what should be included in this menu or think something 
> important is being left out please send that in your feedback as well.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Curtis


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2864 bytes --]

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Chris Case]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3405 bytes --]

Looks fine in IE 6.0 and Firefox.

It pretty much looks fine in konqueror, however if the default background is
set to any other color, the background under the ads, and the bottom of the
page is that color, instead of white. (Say I put it to black... that would
be rather disorienting)

Also, comparing Aaron's site to this one, I must say I agree with most of
the comments. This one has waaaay too much whitespace, and I think the text
is a bit to large. Aaron's site is more more 'tight' and feels a good deal
more profesional, and cleaner. It also takes up less space, making it easy
for me to find what I'm looking for at a glance, instead of scrolling. Just
my $.02.

--Chris

On 11/21/05, Daniel Wahlgren <daniel@tadasweden.com> wrote:
>
> Looks fine in Firefox 1.5 RC2 on Windows XP.
> Looks fine in IE 6.0 on Windows XP.
>
> One thing that feels odd is the Big Flashy Button Things ("Portage<http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=1>:
> an easy to use world-class package management solution.", " Over 8,000
> packages <http://packages.gentoo.org> + in-depth documentation<http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml>= unlimited potential." etc) does not apear on every page. I understand they
> take space, but it looks odd.
>
> Very good, and keep up the good work!
> /Daniel Wahlgren
> Aridhol
>
> Curtis Napier wrote:
>
> This has been cross posted to gentoo-dev and www-redesign.
>
> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
>
> After receiving a ton of very useful feedback from the developer community
> I have updated the redesign. It should now be closer to 100% accessible and
> it should (hopefully) render perfectly in all browsers including text only
> browsers. It now passes XHTML and CSS validation tests.
>
> I'm asking for everyone (developers and users alike) to please have a look
> at the updated site and send any feedback you may have. I'm especially
> interested in feedback from anyone who uses accessibilty programs such as
> screen readers or if you are color blind or have any other accessibilty
> issues.
>
> Also, I only use GNU/Linux and I have only tested on the following
> browsers:
>
> Mozilla-1.7
> firefox-1.0
> Opera-8.5
> Internet Explorer-6 under CrossOver Office
> Epiphany-1.8.2
> Links-2.1 in text mode and graphics mode.
>
> If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or
> Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser version in
> your feedback. I haven't received feedback from Konqueror or Safari so
> feedback from those browsers would be much appreciated.
>
> The only major outstanding issue is the contents of the menu in the grey
> bar at the top and what should appear in the 5 purple boxes directly under
> them. Currently I have that menu listed in order of what a new Gentoo user
> would need to access first. If you have a better idea of what should be
> included in this menu or think something important is being left out please
> send that in your feedback as well.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Curtis
>
>
>


--

Christopher S. Case
SUNY Fredonia
Computer Science / Computer Engineering
macguyvok@gmail.com
(509) 432 - 4725 (Cellphone)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"To err is human. To forgive, divine.
To fix mistakes, now that's an Engineer."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[mushroomblue]

hi there. I've been lurking for ages, but decided to comment when this
was considered the near-final design. I'm not going to be very
organized, but here goes:

when comparing the wwwredesign site to Aaron Shi's design
( http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/mainindex.html ), it's apparent that
someone didn't get the subtle color shifts and alignment. the reason the
advertisements are put on a light grey background is to separate them
from the actual content of the site, thus ensuring that the reader's
eyes are directed accordingly. without the background, the pages just
don't seem to flow correctly. I'm more apt to read the "We produce
Gentoo Linux" (which is an amazingly useless block of text, IMO) and go
straight to the "Colo that box under your desk" ad, and then read the
rest of the ads before even going back to "What's New". 

another small tweak that'd dramatically increase the flow of the site
would be to use Aaron's color scheme for the date and updater on the
front page. the person updating is less important than the date of the
update... unless you're going to include planet.gentoo.org on the main
page. this is why the date is given a prominent color and position, and
the name is given a more subtle font, and softer color. in fact, the use
of the small grey gradient for the first entry immediately blocks off
the large whitespace on the left side of the page, and forces the reader
to start at "what's new", and move down the page correctly.

Might want to use the "light purple background for news topics" instead
of the horizontal line between updates. both work, but the separation of
updates with a highlighted topic is an immediate visual cue, and looks
less tacky.

the fonts on the "cubes of content" (for lack of a better term) just
below the logo on the page are too large. the cube with the "donate"
content should be aligned with the space for advertising (again, what
Aaron Shi did). if at all possible, add a tint of purple to the "make a
donation" button, just so it doesn't stand out so much.

Hmm. why are those aforementioned "cubes" on some pages, and not on
others? "About", "Get Gentoo", and "Docs" have them, but the rest do
not. very jarring when simply clicking through the links. are they
really needed on pages that aren't the index? should the be on every
main section, if just because they're supposed to be conveying vital
information to the reader?

there might actually be too much content (or just too large a default
font) on the front page. unless you don't really like the Documentation,
Resources, and Community sections at the bottom of the page. nobody will
scroll down that far, unless it catches their eye. the three sections
are centered, which is better than on Aaron Shi's site, but the fonts
are far too large. The gap between the section title (Documentation) and
the items within the section (Install Docs, etc) have a big gap between
them. seriously, most of these things are small oversights, but make
HUGE differences in aesthetics.

Another thing, that big useless block of text above "what's new" needs
to be removed. it's not a description of the distribution, it's a
mission statement. mission statements are stupid. you want to make cool
stuff. we get it. explain what gentoo is. take a cue from debian.org,
and explain. if not, move it to the "About" page, where it belongs.

Speaking of the About page, why is there a huge 40K image there that
could easily be put into text? it's not a poster, unless you're using a
very small screen resolution. it's a crappy image, using the old gentoo
logo (in the caption balloon), takes up way too much space on the page,
and just isn't cute enough to include for any reason outside nostalgia.

most of these things are really small problems, but they make a MAJOR
difference on the look of the site. if someone fixes the fonts, and adds
the subtle parts of Aaron's design back to the site, it'll look like the
site Gentoo deserves.





-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Tom Lieber]

On 11/21/05, mushroomblue <mushroomblue@elazulspad.net> wrote:
> the reason the
> advertisements are put on a light grey background is to separate them
> from the actual content of the site, thus ensuring that the reader's
> eyes are directed accordingly. without the background, the pages just
> don't seem to flow correctly.

On my laptop monitor I can't even see the gray until I turn the
brightness waaaay down, so perhaps that is what happened.

> Another thing, that big useless block of text above "what's new" needs
> to be removed. it's not a description of the distribution, it's a
> mission statement. mission statements are stupid.

I agree. What's there now is too much marketing and too little "Gentoo
is Linux, and this is what makes it different."

> Speaking of the About page, why is there a huge 40K image there that
> could easily be put into text?

I agree.

Sincerely,

Tom Lieber
tom@alltom.com
http://AllTom.com/

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

[www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

First of all, thank you everyone for all the feedback. Your input is 
important and greatly appreciated.

I should have said that the last update was not complete as far as 
design was concerned. I was mainly looking for accessibility and 
rendering issues on as many browsers/OS's as possible. I got that 
feedback and fixed the issues that came up. I also implemented the rest 
of the design so it should now be more visually appealing and better 
match Aarons reference design. I took into consideration all of the 
suggestions that were submitted and now ask for additional feedback to 
ensure that my changes didn't introduce any additional 
rendering/accessibility bugs and that the design is acceptable to as 
many people as possible.

If there are no more outstanding issues reported I will submit this 
current layout for approval.


Questions to some of the answers and suggestions that were brought up:

The artwork is all part of the winning design. Any issues with the 
infinity symbol should have been addressed a year ago.

I am not the designer of this site. I am merely implementing it in the 
XSL backend.  I am the only person working on this and I am the 
designated official developer, the project lead is Swift and his role is 
to offer advice, enforce design policy and generally oversee my actions 
and help me with internal gentoo policies and procedures. The project is 
actually owned by Infra and they (they == infra leads which is klieber 
and ramereth as far as I know), along with Swift, have the final say on 
everything. I welcome any and all patches that you are willing to 
submit. All submissions will be evaluated on a case by case basis.

Aarons reference design at www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ is exactly that: A 
reference. In it's current form it differs from his original submission 
which was the winning entry and should not be considered as anything 
else but a reference. I tried to stick to that design as much as 
possible but some things were simply not possible.

Aarons design uses a smaller default font, that is not acceptable from 
an accessibility POV. The main font is at 1em and all cursory fonts 
multipliers of 1em. The main font will remain at 1em which is the 
standard for the accessibility guidelines. If you don't like the 
standard font size every single graphical browser offers a font zoom 
capability, use it.

Aarons use of a smaller font allows more information to appear on the 
page. This is an illusion of size. If you have your browser window set 
to 800x600 or smaller the jumpads disappear and the page has to be 
scrolled to see them no matter how big/small the font is. If you enlarge 
the font on Aarons reference to the standard 1em the jumppads disappear 
and the page must be scrolled anyway so this point is moot.

Purple background with yellow text is hideous. Not going to happen.

The "Locator" would require rewrites of not only the XSL but also the 
actual xml files and is outside the scope of this project. Touching any 
xml content file is strictly off limits, all existing xml should be 
backwards compatible with the new design. This point is not debatable. 
Use of a database would make this task easier while allowing backwards 
compatibility but it will have to wait for a future update to the site 
to be implemented.

I actually implemented a search that used google much like the example 
that was posted here. The search was discussed at length with the 
project lead and it was decided that using a third party search engine 
such as google was unacceptable. As Lance said, this will have to be 
coordinated with infra at a later date. Gentoo is a not-for-profit but, 
unfortunetly, it is the wrong kind of non-profit so Google will not 
sponsor us.

The contents of the uppermost menu are to sites that are outside the 
www.gentoo.org website. They will stay in this location. They are green 
to contrast with the purple background to ensure that colorblind and 
other visually impaired people can see it. Green is the compliment to 
purple so I am baffled that people think the combination is not 
attractive. In Aarons preview the light purple color of these links is 
not visible to color blind individuals thus it is unacceptable. This 
color will not change.

The grey menu should contain links that would be used in order of a new 
user and that highlight the main parts of the site. I did this quickly 
to have something there to look at. I didn't notice any good suggestions 
to replace what is there. If you have suggestions please send them. The 
same goes for the wording in the purple boxes, if you don't like what 
they say submit a suggestion for each. Suggestions of "I don't like it 
you should change it" that don't include a clearly worded replacement 
will be ignored. The donate box is here to stay until the search 
function is implemented.

Graphics should be implemented in the CSS as much as possible to aid 
future maintenance (the xsl templates are huge and not easy to maintain. 
The least amount of editing of these files as possible is one of the 
major goals). In text browsers that can handle graphics but don't 
support CSS the upper left logo (which is a background image so it can 
be put in the css) will not appear but will leave space for the missing 
background image. I can't figure out a way around this. If you have a 
suggestion I would appreciate it.

Horizontal scrolling of the entire page when a code listing is wider 
than the page only happens in IE. All other browsers understand the CSS 
scroll:auto tag and will only scroll the actual code listing. The same 
applies to inline images within the page contents. IE is broken but I 
did everything I could to make it behave the same as other browsers. 
This is one issue that IE is simply broken on and there is nothing I can 
do to fix that. Javascript fixes are available but the use of Javascript 
is strictly forbidden. Javascript is not debatable.

Redundant links to important pages such as the Handbook and Documention 
only serve to make them easier for a user to locate. They will remain 
for the time being unless someone can come up with a good reason to 
remove them other than "I don't like it".

The <hr /> tags in the Handbook navigation are contained within the 
handbook xsl template. Touching that file is outside my scope.

The redesign test site is not a full mirror. I added the security index 
page so we could see what it looks like.

The site is not XHTML it is HTML-4.01 Transitional and it passes the w3c 
validator. Manually overriding HTML-4.01 Transitional in the w3c 
validator is not required and any errors that it reports if you do this 
will not be addressed. If you can come up with a good technical reason 
why doing this would benefit anyone I will address it.

Navigation and useability studies are beyond my scope. These issues 
should have been addressed a year ago.

The left hand navigation column is dead. No amount of beating this dead 
horse will resurrect it. The jumppads will remain at the bottom and 
appear on all non-documentation pages so that those links are accessible 
as much as possible.

<base href> is not needed for this site to function properly. If you 
want to save the page locally you are free to do so and add the tag 
yourself for your local copy.

The CSS is only 12k. Why would shaving 4k off of it to make it 8k make a 
difference to anyone?

The site is dynamically generated with XSL/XML all the pages end in 
.xml. There are no plans to change it to .xhtml now or in the future.

The image on the about page is within the content xml file and not 
within the XSL template. Touching about.xml or any other xml content 
file is outside my scope.

GLEP 10 is outside my scope.

The jumppads have alt text. They always have. They pop up as tool tips 
on every browser I have tested. If they aren't for you please submit 
your browser version and OS and I will look into it.

The blue text that represents code was darkened for accessibility 
issues. It will not change.

In Aarons preview the search box and the ads column are placed with a 
Position:absolute and has it's size set. At resolutions below 800x600 
this makes the ads overlap the content and the search box overlap the 
box to the left on every browser. When content is scarce the ads overlap 
the footer. This is not fixable given the current state of css support 
in the various browsers. After many many many long hours of research and 
experimentation I decided that we would have to resort to a table for 
the ads column and include the search (now donate) box within the div 
that contains the four purple boxes with a % width to fix this issue. I 
lowered the % width of the donate box and increased the others to bring 
it more inline with Aarons original design. It's not perfect but it's 
close enough.

Accessibilty guidelines say that all text links should be underlined. I 
made an exception for the grey menu bar for aesthetic purposes but will 
not make an exception for any other links.

gentoo.org and all domains owned by the Gentoo Foundation should render 
correctly in all browsers that are still in general use. IE5 on the mac 
is still a valid browser and will be supported as much as possible.

Summary and authors are important and should be prominently displayed 
before the actual content. On the current design they are on the right 
in a tiny column that wraps every two words. This is unacceptable. These 
items will stay at the top for now unless someone can come up with a 
place to put them that makes sense, looks good, allows the summary to be 
seen on top and not below the content (because a summary should be above 
the content otherwise why have a summary if you have to scroll past the 
content to see it?). The handbook is the only page that has a large list 
of authors and authors only appear on the first page so this should not 
be a problem.



Here is a list of items that have changed since my last post:

*menu code was changed from a floated block list to a simple inline div 
with non-breaking spaces. This should fix the IE5 on Mac issue.

*Background color for content was made light grey with black text for 
better visibility of the text. Bright monitors should no longer be a 
problem.

*background color of the ads was made darker to contrast with the 
content area. Decorative header was added.

*white space was collapsed as much as possible.

*all extraneous information and decorative news headers were removed 
from the front page to help readability and to bring focus to the 
information. This includes the cow image and text. Overwhelming amounts 
of information on the front page should no longer be a problem. This 
also brings the jumppads closer to the top so new users will be better 
able to spot them.

*table headers were centered and data cells left justified.

*table borders are now collapsed and only 1px thick. They are no longer 
ugly.

*removed the BOLD from the design credit in the footer. This wasn't 
supposed to be BOLD in the first place, probably a mistake on my part.

*The purple boxes below the grey menu bar now only appear on the main index.

*news poster date and submitter color changed to match Aarons design

*added a filter that removes the author and date if they are missing or 
script generated.

*removed redundant doc title

*removed the donation button image and replaced it with a simple button.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[mushroomblue]

other than making the cell that contains the "donate" button the same
width as the advertisement column, it looks MUCH better.

blue ribbon. 


On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 01:40 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> First of all, thank you everyone for all the feedback. Your input is 
> important and greatly appreciated.
> 
> I should have said that the last update was not complete as far as 
> design was concerned. I was mainly looking for accessibility and 
> rendering issues on as many browsers/OS's as possible. I got that 
> feedback and fixed the issues that came up. I also implemented the rest 
> of the design so it should now be more visually appealing and better 
> match Aarons reference design. I took into consideration all of the 
> suggestions that were submitted and now ask for additional feedback to 
> ensure that my changes didn't introduce any additional 
> rendering/accessibility bugs and that the design is acceptable to as 
> many people as possible.
> 
> If there are no more outstanding issues reported I will submit this 
> current layout for approval.
> 
> 
> Questions to some of the answers and suggestions that were brought up:
> 
> The artwork is all part of the winning design. Any issues with the 
> infinity symbol should have been addressed a year ago.
> 
> I am not the designer of this site. I am merely implementing it in the 
> XSL backend.  I am the only person working on this and I am the 
> designated official developer, the project lead is Swift and his role is 
> to offer advice, enforce design policy and generally oversee my actions 
> and help me with internal gentoo policies and procedures. The project is 
> actually owned by Infra and they (they == infra leads which is klieber 
> and ramereth as far as I know), along with Swift, have the final say on 
> everything. I welcome any and all patches that you are willing to 
> submit. All submissions will be evaluated on a case by case basis.
> 
> Aarons reference design at www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ is exactly that: A 
> reference. In it's current form it differs from his original submission 
> which was the winning entry and should not be considered as anything 
> else but a reference. I tried to stick to that design as much as 
> possible but some things were simply not possible.
> 
> Aarons design uses a smaller default font, that is not acceptable from 
> an accessibility POV. The main font is at 1em and all cursory fonts 
> multipliers of 1em. The main font will remain at 1em which is the 
> standard for the accessibility guidelines. If you don't like the 
> standard font size every single graphical browser offers a font zoom 
> capability, use it.
> 
> Aarons use of a smaller font allows more information to appear on the 
> page. This is an illusion of size. If you have your browser window set 
> to 800x600 or smaller the jumpads disappear and the page has to be 
> scrolled to see them no matter how big/small the font is. If you enlarge 
> the font on Aarons reference to the standard 1em the jumppads disappear 
> and the page must be scrolled anyway so this point is moot.
> 
> Purple background with yellow text is hideous. Not going to happen.
> 
> The "Locator" would require rewrites of not only the XSL but also the 
> actual xml files and is outside the scope of this project. Touching any 
> xml content file is strictly off limits, all existing xml should be 
> backwards compatible with the new design. This point is not debatable. 
> Use of a database would make this task easier while allowing backwards 
> compatibility but it will have to wait for a future update to the site 
> to be implemented.
> 
> I actually implemented a search that used google much like the example 
> that was posted here. The search was discussed at length with the 
> project lead and it was decided that using a third party search engine 
> such as google was unacceptable. As Lance said, this will have to be 
> coordinated with infra at a later date. Gentoo is a not-for-profit but, 
> unfortunetly, it is the wrong kind of non-profit so Google will not 
> sponsor us.
> 
> The contents of the uppermost menu are to sites that are outside the 
> www.gentoo.org website. They will stay in this location. They are green 
> to contrast with the purple background to ensure that colorblind and 
> other visually impaired people can see it. Green is the compliment to 
> purple so I am baffled that people think the combination is not 
> attractive. In Aarons preview the light purple color of these links is 
> not visible to color blind individuals thus it is unacceptable. This 
> color will not change.
> 
> The grey menu should contain links that would be used in order of a new 
> user and that highlight the main parts of the site. I did this quickly 
> to have something there to look at. I didn't notice any good suggestions 
> to replace what is there. If you have suggestions please send them. The 
> same goes for the wording in the purple boxes, if you don't like what 
> they say submit a suggestion for each. Suggestions of "I don't like it 
> you should change it" that don't include a clearly worded replacement 
> will be ignored. The donate box is here to stay until the search 
> function is implemented.
> 
> Graphics should be implemented in the CSS as much as possible to aid 
> future maintenance (the xsl templates are huge and not easy to maintain. 
> The least amount of editing of these files as possible is one of the 
> major goals). In text browsers that can handle graphics but don't 
> support CSS the upper left logo (which is a background image so it can 
> be put in the css) will not appear but will leave space for the missing 
> background image. I can't figure out a way around this. If you have a 
> suggestion I would appreciate it.
> 
> Horizontal scrolling of the entire page when a code listing is wider 
> than the page only happens in IE. All other browsers understand the CSS 
> scroll:auto tag and will only scroll the actual code listing. The same 
> applies to inline images within the page contents. IE is broken but I 
> did everything I could to make it behave the same as other browsers. 
> This is one issue that IE is simply broken on and there is nothing I can 
> do to fix that. Javascript fixes are available but the use of Javascript 
> is strictly forbidden. Javascript is not debatable.
> 
> Redundant links to important pages such as the Handbook and Documention 
> only serve to make them easier for a user to locate. They will remain 
> for the time being unless someone can come up with a good reason to 
> remove them other than "I don't like it".
> 
> The <hr /> tags in the Handbook navigation are contained within the 
> handbook xsl template. Touching that file is outside my scope.
> 
> The redesign test site is not a full mirror. I added the security index 
> page so we could see what it looks like.
> 
> The site is not XHTML it is HTML-4.01 Transitional and it passes the w3c 
> validator. Manually overriding HTML-4.01 Transitional in the w3c 
> validator is not required and any errors that it reports if you do this 
> will not be addressed. If you can come up with a good technical reason 
> why doing this would benefit anyone I will address it.
> 
> Navigation and useability studies are beyond my scope. These issues 
> should have been addressed a year ago.
> 
> The left hand navigation column is dead. No amount of beating this dead 
> horse will resurrect it. The jumppads will remain at the bottom and 
> appear on all non-documentation pages so that those links are accessible 
> as much as possible.
> 
> <base href> is not needed for this site to function properly. If you 
> want to save the page locally you are free to do so and add the tag 
> yourself for your local copy.
> 
> The CSS is only 12k. Why would shaving 4k off of it to make it 8k make a 
> difference to anyone?
> 
> The site is dynamically generated with XSL/XML all the pages end in 
> .xml. There are no plans to change it to .xhtml now or in the future.
> 
> The image on the about page is within the content xml file and not 
> within the XSL template. Touching about.xml or any other xml content 
> file is outside my scope.
> 
> GLEP 10 is outside my scope.
> 
> The jumppads have alt text. They always have. They pop up as tool tips 
> on every browser I have tested. If they aren't for you please submit 
> your browser version and OS and I will look into it.
> 
> The blue text that represents code was darkened for accessibility 
> issues. It will not change.
> 
> In Aarons preview the search box and the ads column are placed with a 
> Position:absolute and has it's size set. At resolutions below 800x600 
> this makes the ads overlap the content and the search box overlap the 
> box to the left on every browser. When content is scarce the ads overlap 
> the footer. This is not fixable given the current state of css support 
> in the various browsers. After many many many long hours of research and 
> experimentation I decided that we would have to resort to a table for 
> the ads column and include the search (now donate) box within the div 
> that contains the four purple boxes with a % width to fix this issue. I 
> lowered the % width of the donate box and increased the others to bring 
> it more inline with Aarons original design. It's not perfect but it's 
> close enough.
> 
> Accessibilty guidelines say that all text links should be underlined. I 
> made an exception for the grey menu bar for aesthetic purposes but will 
> not make an exception for any other links.
> 
> gentoo.org and all domains owned by the Gentoo Foundation should render 
> correctly in all browsers that are still in general use. IE5 on the mac 
> is still a valid browser and will be supported as much as possible.
> 
> Summary and authors are important and should be prominently displayed 
> before the actual content. On the current design they are on the right 
> in a tiny column that wraps every two words. This is unacceptable. These 
> items will stay at the top for now unless someone can come up with a 
> place to put them that makes sense, looks good, allows the summary to be 
> seen on top and not below the content (because a summary should be above 
> the content otherwise why have a summary if you have to scroll past the 
> content to see it?). The handbook is the only page that has a large list 
> of authors and authors only appear on the first page so this should not 
> be a problem.
> 
> 
> 
> Here is a list of items that have changed since my last post:
> 
> *menu code was changed from a floated block list to a simple inline div 
> with non-breaking spaces. This should fix the IE5 on Mac issue.
> 
> *Background color for content was made light grey with black text for 
> better visibility of the text. Bright monitors should no longer be a 
> problem.
> 
> *background color of the ads was made darker to contrast with the 
> content area. Decorative header was added.
> 
> *white space was collapsed as much as possible.
> 
> *all extraneous information and decorative news headers were removed 
> from the front page to help readability and to bring focus to the 
> information. This includes the cow image and text. Overwhelming amounts 
> of information on the front page should no longer be a problem. This 
> also brings the jumppads closer to the top so new users will be better 
> able to spot them.
> 
> *table headers were centered and data cells left justified.
> 
> *table borders are now collapsed and only 1px thick. They are no longer 
> ugly.
> 
> *removed the BOLD from the design credit in the footer. This wasn't 
> supposed to be BOLD in the first place, probably a mistake on my part.
> 
> *The purple boxes below the grey menu bar now only appear on the main index.
> 
> *news poster date and submitter color changed to match Aarons design
> 
> *added a filter that removes the author and date if they are missing or 
> script generated.
> 
> *removed redundant doc title
> 
> *removed the donation button image and replaced it with a simple button.

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Aaron Shi]

> I should have said that the last update was not complete as 
> far as design was concerned. I was mainly looking for 
> accessibility and rendering issues on as many browsers/OS's 
> as possible. I got that feedback and fixed the issues that 
> came up. I also implemented the rest of the design so it 
> should now be more visually appealing and better match Aarons 
> reference design. I took into consideration all of the 
> suggestions that were submitted and now ask for additional 
> feedback to ensure that my changes didn't introduce any 
> additional rendering/accessibility bugs and that the design 
> is acceptable to as many people as possible.
> 
> If there are no more outstanding issues reported I will 
> submit this current layout for approval.

Sorry, but this looks worse. The colors (other than what's in the original
graphics) are way off.  I'm going make a wild guess that an uncalibrated LCD
is being used to view the site.  Many panels are not capable of the full
16.7 million range and uses dithering techniques to emulate the other
colors.  So in reality, the colors when viewed on proper LCD and CRTs are
slightly off (but all the "off-ness" in colors adds up and the combined
effect is quite obvious). 


> Any issues with the 
> infinity symbol should have been addressed a year ago.

Amen.


> Aarons reference design at www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ is 
> exactly that: A 
> reference. In it's current form it differs from his original 
> submission 
> which was the winning entry and should not be considered as anything 
> else but a reference. I tried to stick to that design as much as 
> possible but some things were simply not possible.

The reference I made, after listening to comments on the forums, etc., is
what I believe an improvement to the original submission.  However, the live
site right now, while the backend is perhaps implemented with improvements,
the frontend (the design) is a deterioration.  I understand there are
technical limitations to what's possible.  I've worked with CMS's and
combining backend with frontend etc., but it's about injecting data into the
design; not the other way around.  This is usually done after reference
templates are done and "locked," and the final output of the injection
effort is usually very close to the references templates.  The Gentoo
templating system seems to be such a way that everyone working on this
project, Curtis and myself included, have to work contrary to normal
processes in order to force things to work.


> Aarons design uses a smaller default font, that is not 
> acceptable from 
> an accessibility POV. The main font is at 1em and all cursory fonts 
> multipliers of 1em. The main font will remain at 1em which is the 
> standard for the accessibility guidelines. If you don't like the 
> standard font size every single graphical browser offers a font zoom 
> capability, use it.

If you look at all of the professionally designed sites on the Internet, I
bet they're using a font size similar to what's in the reference templates.
The reality is, most people are _not_ on 1600x1200 resolutions and the font
used in the live site is just plain huge.  I'm using 1280x1024 and it's
still gigantic! (All of my browsers' font zoom is default.)  Even
mozilla.org's fonts are about half the size of what we're using.  Looking at
other "modern" open source sites, freebsd (nice facelift), fedora, etc. none
of them are using fonts as large as ours, not even close.  The browser's
zoom capability is really a double-edged sword...

That said, all the "reading/content" fonts are controlled using 1 value in
global.css, change font-size in body and the whole site will change.  The
"reading" font I'm referring to is specified for the real substance on the
page that people want to read, i.e. the content.  The philosophy is that
content "reading" fonts can be larger or flexible (hence I put in the
font-size adjuster so people can increase/decrease the content font size and
have that remembered in a cookie).  However, fonts that are an inherent part
of design should be congruent with the design itself.  

E.g. Redhat, http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/home/services/

Their reading font is large, but the fonts associated with the design (nav
bar items, side bar, legal, etc.) are not being blown out of proportion.
People are not going to be reading these elements for hours on end, so it's
okay.  If you consider your _main_ audience, it's irrational to worsen the
experience for 99% of the people so that the other 1% can have an ok
experience.  Redhat's reading font is already on the large end of what is
acceptable in a professionally designed site.

The other problem with setting the default font so large, is that if you
increase the font size just by a little bit, everything will go nuts.

E.g. http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/aaronsplus2.png  VS.
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/liveplus2.png

Both of the above were increased by 2 sizes in Firefox.  What I'm getting at
is that if people set their browser defaults just a bit larger, then
everything would explode.  In reality, it's more likely that people will set
their browser defaults larger rather than smaller.  The odds of it being
blown up due to us setting a large default font is even greater in that
respect.


> Purple background with yellow text is hideous. Not going to happen.

It's pea green.  If we consider color theory, this shade of green is much
more in line with our shade of purple (they are as best of a match between
purple and green as you can get).  The saturation is also much closer (69%
vs. 70%) where as with the live site green it's (69% vs. 100%).  This live
site green, when viewed on (proper) displays, actually causes eye strain
because the colors are _unnatural_ together.

Green vs. yellow: http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/greenvsyellow.png

Pea Green (top) vs. Live Site Green (bottom):
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/greentest.png  The bottom one hurts
doesn't it?


> The "Locator" would require rewrites of not only the XSL but also the 
> actual xml files and is outside the scope of this project. 
> Touching any 
> xml content file is strictly off limits, all existing xml should be 
> backwards compatible with the new design. This point is not 
> debatable. 
> Use of a database would make this task easier while allowing 
> backwards 
> compatibility but it will have to wait for a future update to 
> the site 
> to be implemented.

Fair enough.


> The contents of the uppermost menu are to sites that are outside the 
> www.gentoo.org website. They will stay in this location. They 
> are green 
> to contrast with the purple background to ensure that colorblind and 
> other visually impaired people can see it. Green is the compliment to 
> purple so I am baffled that people think the combination is not 
> attractive. In Aarons preview the light purple color of these 
> links is 
> not visible to color blind individuals thus it is unacceptable. This 
> color will not change.

The contrast between the purples should be enough, the lighter purple is
roughly 2x brighter than the darker purple.  The green makes it standout too
much, especially the live site green.  It's distracting.  Originally, this
element was intended as an indicator (to complement the locator) of the
Gentoo network site a user is on.  If we come back to asking the fundamental
questions, by looking at any given page do I know where I am?  After
browsing around, am I still on the same sub site?  Or have I gone from main
to planet to bugs to ...?  I understand this is a lost cause, but it's good
to know that a "locator" of some sort is being considered for the future.
Breadcrumbs have been a rather standard feature since the late 90s.


> The grey menu should contain links that would be used in 
> order of a new 
> user and that highlight the main parts of the site. I did 
> this quickly 
> to have something there to look at. I didn't notice any good 
> suggestions 
> to replace what is there. If you have suggestions please send 
> them. The 
> same goes for the wording in the purple boxes, if you don't like what 
> they say submit a suggestion for each. Suggestions of "I 
> don't like it 
> you should change it" that don't include a clearly worded replacement 
> will be ignored. The donate box is here to stay until the search 
> function is implemented.

Agreed.  I think what we're both noticing here is that we're building the
house from top to bottom rather than from the ground up.  The information
architecture should be in place and/or optimized before the design is ever
started.  Oops, scratch that, if I recall I think swift made a site map
somewhere...  The issue of what goes in the nav bar has been raised before
and there was a semi-resolution to it.


> Graphics should be implemented in the CSS as much as possible to aid 
> future maintenance (the xsl templates are huge and not easy 
> to maintain. 
> The least amount of editing of these files as possible is one of the 
> major goals). In text browsers that can handle graphics but don't 
> support CSS the upper left logo (which is a background image 
> so it can 
> be put in the css) will not appear but will leave space for 
> the missing 
> background image. I can't figure out a way around this. If you have a 
> suggestion I would appreciate it.

I tried to do everything in CSS, which is why having a printable version of
the site (http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepageprint.html) is easy.
Nothing is changed.  No CSS files are changed.  The _only_ difference is
that the print CSS file is added to the end of the cascade, so that the
print CSS rules overrides certain elements we want to redefine for print.
Basically, with the logically structured HTML, we can change the design a
whole lot without touching the HTML simply by manipulating the CSS.  I.e. I
had in mind different themes and elements for xmas, halloween, etc. and only
an extra CSS file is required to add the changes (without touching the
existing CSS files).


> Horizontal scrolling of the entire page when a code listing is wider 
> than the page only happens in IE. All other browsers 
> understand the CSS 
> scroll:auto tag and will only scroll the actual code listing. 
> The same 
> applies to inline images within the page contents. IE is broken but I 
> did everything I could to make it behave the same as other browsers. 
> This is one issue that IE is simply broken on and there is 
> nothing I can 
> do to fix that. Javascript fixes are available but the use of 
> Javascript 
> is strictly forbidden. Javascript is not debatable.

I think this problem was fixed in my reference page, some googling uncovered
the solution (http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html).  If in IE,
scale down the window, the scroll bars will automatically appear on the code
listing when necessary.  It behaves identically as in Firefox etc.  I'm not
too sure what you mean by the inline image problem, can you explain (maybe a
demo is easier)?


> The <hr /> tags in the Handbook navigation are contained within the 
> handbook xsl template. Touching that file is outside my scope.

They look ok anyway, but we can probably add a CSS rule to make it nicer if
necessary.


> The site is not XHTML it is HTML-4.01 Transitional and it 
> passes the w3c 
> validator. Manually overriding HTML-4.01 Transitional in the w3c 
> validator is not required and any errors that it reports if 
> you do this 
> will not be addressed. If you can come up with a good 
> technical reason 
> why doing this would benefit anyone I will address it.

The differences between the two specs (at least HTML 4.01 vs. XHTML 1.0; --
1.1+ is another story) are not really that significant.  I don't see why we
can't switch to XHTML unless there are inherent coding in the system that we
can't mess with.


> Navigation and useability studies are beyond my scope. These issues 
> should have been addressed a year ago.

I tried to address those issues (with pages of explainations etc.), but my
suggestions were completely ignored.  Hence, I won't say anymore about this.


> The left hand navigation column is dead. No amount of beating 
> this dead 
> horse will resurrect it. The jumppads will remain at the bottom and 
> appear on all non-documentation pages so that those links are 
> accessible 
> as much as possible.

We can also make additional jump pads if necessary.  I only did 3 for the
sample.


> In Aarons preview the search box and the ads column are placed with a 
> Position:absolute and has it's size set. At resolutions below 800x600 
> this makes the ads overlap the content and the search box overlap the 
> box to the left on every browser. When content is scarce the 
> ads overlap 
> the footer. This is not fixable given the current state of 
> css support 
> in the various browsers. After many many many long hours of 
> research and 
> experimentation I decided that we would have to resort to a table for 
> the ads column and include the search (now donate) box within the div 
> that contains the four purple boxes with a % width to fix 
> this issue. I 
> lowered the % width of the donate box and increased the 
> others to bring 
> it more inline with Aarons original design. It's not perfect but it's 
> close enough.

It looks fine at 700x500.  Even smaller at 640x480, it's still ok.  This is
because there's a min-width rule specified for the content area.  Modern
browsers should respect this rule (IE doesn't, but Firefox, etc. and Opera
are fine).

http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/700x500ref.png

Speaking of lower resolutions, the author credits takes up the entire screen
(http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/700x500live.png).  I originally
thought about doing it this way, but after trying with that same author list
it didn't seem right.  Hence the design was reworked to use the side bar, as
old Gentoo site does, for author listings.  It seems to work better.

The side bar overlapping the footer when there is minimal content is a known
issue.  It's not as if we have the handbook in the footer. ;)  The
alternative is to have the footer block the bottom of the side bar, but the
implementation is much more convoluted that it's not worth it.  On the other
hand, the side bar in the live site stops abruptly if the content is long.
If content is the main focus, does it make sense to show a whole page's
worth of white space just so the sidebar can display entirely?


> Accessibilty guidelines say that all text links should be 
> underlined. I 
> made an exception for the grey menu bar for aesthetic 
> purposes but will 
> not make an exception for any other links.

My thoughts exactly, although the author list is missing the underlines.


> gentoo.org and all domains owned by the Gentoo Foundation 
> should render 
> correctly in all browsers that are still in general use. IE5 
> on the mac 
> is still a valid browser and will be supported as much as possible.

In my own site logs, Netscape 4 still out numbers IE5 for Mac (go figure).
It's a simple cost/benefit analysis and in the end is it worth it to support
such non-standard-compliant browsers?  What message are we sending? --- we
try to accommodate a few at the cost of the majority?  


> Summary and authors are important and should be prominently displayed 
> before the actual content. On the current design they are on 
> the right 
> in a tiny column that wraps every two words. This is 
> unacceptable. These 
> items will stay at the top for now unless someone can come up with a 
> place to put them that makes sense, looks good, allows the 
> summary to be 
> seen on top and not below the content (because a summary 
> should be above 
> the content otherwise why have a summary if you have to 
> scroll past the 
> content to see it?). The handbook is the only page that has a 
> large list 
> of authors and authors only appear on the first page so this 
> should not 
> be a problem.

I had placed the title, summary, date modified (highlightly prominently in
it's own box) at the top, and the authors on the side.  It's the best I
option I could come up with that doesn't kill usability (see my point a few
paragraphcs above re: author list filling entiring screen; see my previous
email re: what is usability).


> *Background color for content was made light grey with black text for 
> better visibility of the text. Bright monitors should no longer be a 
> problem.

Background should remain white, it's much easier to work with.  To make it
easier on the eyes, just lighten up the text a little (i.e. so it's not
black on white which is high contrast but high contrast also strains the
eyes after prolonged reading).  I used #515151, which is 81% gray.  The
other point for not having colored backgrounds is that it looks particularly
bad on laptops running on battery.  When the screen dims when it's not on
AC, it's all over.


> *background color of the ads was made darker to contrast with the 
> content area. Decorative header was added.

Please check the original colors, I think that was sufficient in boxing that
area while leaving the text readable.


> *all extraneous information and decorative news headers were removed 
> from the front page to help readability and to bring focus to the 
> information. This includes the cow image and text. 
> Overwhelming amounts 
> of information on the front page should no longer be a problem. This 
> also brings the jumppads closer to the top so new users will 
> be better 
> able to spot them.

If decoration is used sparingly, it's great.  If we want to be purely
information based, and ignore appearance and marketing, we could go text
only.  


> *table borders are now collapsed and only 1px thick. They are 
> no longer 
> ugly.

Getting better...


> *The purple boxes below the grey menu bar now only appear on 
> the main index.

Perfect, that was the original intention.


Some other points:
- margins! Do books, magazines, newspapers not have margins? Keep it
familiar for the readesr.

- In IE, the top content starts ok, as you scroll down, everything shifts to
the left.  If it's a long page, by the time you get to the bottom, 20% of
the content is out of bounds (to the left).  E.g.
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=8
The last sentence which says "You may now continue with Installing Necessary
System Tools." only reads "ith Installing Necessary System Tools."

- It's probably a good idea to add Arial to the fonts in CSS.  Right now
we're leaving out the 90% of the PC market.

Hope that helps.

Aaron 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Kurt Lieber]

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On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 06:39:08AM -0800 or thereabouts, Aaron Shi wrote:
> Sorry, but this looks worse. The colors (other than what's in the original
> graphics) are way off.  I'm going make a wild guess that an uncalibrated LCD
> is being used to view the site.  Many panels are not capable of the full
> 16.7 million range and uses dithering techniques to emulate the other
> colors.  So in reality, the colors when viewed on proper LCD and CRTs are
> slightly off (but all the "off-ness" in colors adds up and the combined
> effect is quite obvious). 

Reviewing the two sites:

http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/mainindex.html (original)
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/ (current)

I agree with Aaron that the original one looks far better.  The colors are
much more complementary, the layout is cleaner and the site looks more
professional overall.

My $.02.

--kurt

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Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Wednesday 23 November 2005 15:39, Aaron Shi wrote:
> > I should have said that the last update was not complete as
> > far as design was concerned. I was mainly looking for
> > accessibility and rendering issues on as many browsers/OS's
> > as possible. I got that feedback and fixed the issues that
> > came up. I also implemented the rest of the design so it
> > should now be more visually appealing and better match Aarons
> > reference design. I took into consideration all of the
> > suggestions that were submitted and now ask for additional
> > feedback to ensure that my changes didn't introduce any
> > additional rendering/accessibility bugs and that the design
> > is acceptable to as many people as possible.
> >
> > If there are no more outstanding issues reported I will
> > submit this current layout for approval.
>
> Sorry, but this looks worse. The colors (other than what's in the
> original graphics) are way off.  I'm going make a wild guess that an
> uncalibrated LCD is being used to view the site.  Many panels are not
> capable of the full 16.7 million range and uses dithering techniques to
> emulate the other colors.  So in reality, the colors when viewed on
> proper LCD and CRTs are slightly off (but all the "off-ness" in colors
> adds up and the combined effect is quite obvious).

I agree, the reference still looks better. And indeed an LCD is not really 
a good judge of colors.

>
> > Any issues with the
> > infinity symbol should have been addressed a year ago.
>
> Amen.

Could you anyway make a version where the infinity symbol is made by 
clipping two "oh"'s together. I would like to see how they visually 
compare. I find the infinity symbol to be dissonant towards the "gent" 
letters.

> The reference I made, after listening to comments on the forums, etc.,
> is what I believe an improvement to the original submission.  However,
> the live site right now, while the backend is perhaps implemented with
> improvements, the frontend (the design) is a deterioration.  I
> understand there are technical limitations to what's possible.  I've
> worked with CMS's and combining backend with frontend etc., but it's
> about injecting data into the design; not the other way around.  This
> is usually done after reference templates are done and "locked," and
> the final output of the injection effort is usually very close to the
> references templates.  The Gentoo templating system seems to be such a
> way that everyone working on this project, Curtis and myself included,
> have to work contrary to normal processes in order to force things to
> work.

At the time, the design was approved understanding that it would be a 
guide towards the final looks. Not an absolute this and nothing else. 
Further the designer (Aaron) was encouraged to participate in 
implementing his design. Partly to make small improvements, and to fill 
in the design where it was missing. As such I fully believe that the new 
reference could be used as basis.

> If you look at all of the professionally designed sites on the
> Internet, I bet they're using a font size similar to what's in the
> reference templates. The reality is, most people are _not_ on 1600x1200
> resolutions and the font used in the live site is just plain huge.  I'm
> using 1280x1024 and it's still gigantic! (All of my browsers' font zoom
> is default.)  Even mozilla.org's fonts are about half the size of what
> we're using.  Looking at other "modern" open source sites, freebsd
> (nice facelift), fedora, etc. none of them are using fonts as large as
> ours, not even close.  The browser's zoom capability is really a
> double-edged sword...
>
> That said, all the "reading/content" fonts are controlled using 1 value
> in global.css, change font-size in body and the whole site will change.
>  The "reading" font I'm referring to is specified for the real
> substance on the page that people want to read, i.e. the content.  The
> philosophy is that content "reading" fonts can be larger or flexible
> (hence I put in the font-size adjuster so people can increase/decrease
> the content font size and have that remembered in a cookie).  However,
> fonts that are an inherent part of design should be congruent with the
> design itself.

I agree, I think that the main text size should be taken from the browser 
settings. Those are normally reasonable (smaller than wwwredesign) AND 
what the user prefers. The text zoom function is just a kludge around 
sites that have been wrongly designed. The font size of menu items could 
be set, but body size shouldn't.
>
> Green vs. yellow:
> http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/greenvsyellow.png
>
> Pea Green (top) vs. Live Site Green (bottom):
> http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/greentest.png  The bottom one
> hurts doesn't it?

Yes it does.

>
> > The "Locator" would require rewrites of not only the XSL but also the
> > actual xml files and is outside the scope of this project.
> > Touching any
> > xml content file is strictly off limits, all existing xml should be
> > backwards compatible with the new design. This point is not
> > debatable.
> > Use of a database would make this task easier while allowing
> > backwards
> > compatibility but it will have to wait for a future update to
> > the site
> > to be implemented.
>
> Fair enough.

I think the design should be made to include a locator when given in the 
page. I would think something like adding an optional "<parent>" tag to 
the DTD. The DTD would then query the parent for it's parent 
(recursively) and display that parent, and then this one. (Creating the 
path). It would be compatible with existing pages, while still allowing 
forward progress. I see no reason why it would be impossible to change 
the DTD as long as current pages are still supported.

>
> > The contents of the uppermost menu are to sites that are outside the
> > www.gentoo.org website. They will stay in this location. They
> > are green
> > to contrast with the purple background to ensure that colorblind and
> > other visually impaired people can see it. Green is the compliment to
> > purple so I am baffled that people think the combination is not
> > attractive. In Aarons preview the light purple color of these
> > links is
> > not visible to color blind individuals thus it is unacceptable. This
> > color will not change.
>
> The contrast between the purples should be enough, the lighter purple
> is roughly 2x brighter than the darker purple.  The green makes it
> standout too much, especially the live site green.  It's distracting. 
> Originally, this element was intended as an indicator (to complement
> the locator) of the Gentoo network site a user is on.  If we come back
> to asking the fundamental questions, by looking at any given page do I
> know where I am?  After browsing around, am I still on the same sub
> site?  Or have I gone from main to planet to bugs to ...?  I understand
> this is a lost cause, but it's good to know that a "locator" of some
> sort is being considered for the future. Breadcrumbs have been a rather
> standard feature since the late 90s.

And I see no reason to not implement them (as above).

> > Graphics should be implemented in the CSS as much as possible to aid
> > future maintenance (the xsl templates are huge and not easy
> > to maintain.
> > The least amount of editing of these files as possible is one of the
> > major goals). In text browsers that can handle graphics but don't
> > support CSS the upper left logo (which is a background image
> > so it can
> > be put in the css) will not appear but will leave space for
> > the missing
> > background image. I can't figure out a way around this. If you have a
> > suggestion I would appreciate it.
>
> I tried to do everything in CSS, which is why having a printable
> version of the site
> (http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepageprint.html) is easy. Nothing
> is changed.  No CSS files are changed.  The _only_ difference is that
> the print CSS file is added to the end of the cascade, so that the
> print CSS rules overrides certain elements we want to redefine for
> print. Basically, with the logically structured HTML, we can change the
> design a whole lot without touching the HTML simply by manipulating the
> CSS.  I.e. I had in mind different themes and elements for xmas,
> halloween, etc. and only an extra CSS file is required to add the
> changes (without touching the existing CSS files).

Besides the fact that I agree with this, it is also the way that things 
will go in the future as propagated by the W3C. And indeed, css should be 
used predominantly for the design.

>
> > Horizontal scrolling of the entire page when a code listing is wider
> > than the page only happens in IE. All other browsers
> > understand the CSS
> > scroll:auto tag and will only scroll the actual code listing.
> > The same
> > applies to inline images within the page contents. IE is broken but I
> > did everything I could to make it behave the same as other browsers.
> > This is one issue that IE is simply broken on and there is
> > nothing I can
> > do to fix that. Javascript fixes are available but the use of
> > Javascript
> > is strictly forbidden. Javascript is not debatable.
>
> I think this problem was fixed in my reference page, some googling
> uncovered the solution (http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html).
>  If in IE, scale down the window, the scroll bars will automatically
> appear on the code listing when necessary.  It behaves identically as
> in Firefox etc.  I'm not too sure what you mean by the inline image
> problem, can you explain (maybe a demo is easier)?
>

I see no reason why javascript could not be used to circumvent the 
behaviour of certain (enumerated) broken browsers. Normally working 
browsers do not use the javascript and would look exactly the same with 
or without javascript enabled. The broken browser looks properly (or as 
proper as possible with the broken behaviour) though.

> > The site is not XHTML it is HTML-4.01 Transitional and it
> > passes the w3c
> > validator. Manually overriding HTML-4.01 Transitional in the w3c
> > validator is not required and any errors that it reports if
> > you do this
> > will not be addressed. If you can come up with a good
> > technical reason
> > why doing this would benefit anyone I will address it.

Why not implement either html-4.01 strict, xhtml-1.0 (transitional or 
strict) or even xhtml-1.1. All are compatible with browsers that 
understand 4.01 transitional. If possible xhtml-1.1 would encertain that 
the layout and structure of the pages are properly separated.

>
> The differences between the two specs (at least HTML 4.01 vs. XHTML
> 1.0; -- 1.1+ is another story) are not really that significant.  I
> don't see why we can't switch to XHTML unless there are inherent coding
> in the system that we can't mess with.

I don't see it either. I also don't see why transitional is needed when we 
have such a tightly controlled source language. None of the pages 
actually contains actual html, so having the stylesheet support xhtml-1.1 
(has no transitional version) should be straightforward.

>
> > Navigation and useability studies are beyond my scope. These issues
> > should have been addressed a year ago.
>
> I tried to address those issues (with pages of explainations etc.), but
> my suggestions were completely ignored.  Hence, I won't say anymore
> about this.

Please still give your suggestions. I think it is important they are 
properly performed.

>
> > The left hand navigation column is dead. No amount of beating
> > this dead
> > horse will resurrect it. The jumppads will remain at the bottom and
> > appear on all non-documentation pages so that those links are
> > accessible
> > as much as possible.

Don't be so thickheaded.

>
> We can also make additional jump pads if necessary.  I only did 3 for
> the sample.
>
> > In Aarons preview the search box and the ads column are placed with a
> > Position:absolute and has it's size set. At resolutions below 800x600
> > this makes the ads overlap the content and the search box overlap the
> > box to the left on every browser. When content is scarce the
> > ads overlap
> > the footer. This is not fixable given the current state of
> > css support
> > in the various browsers. After many many many long hours of
> > research and
> > experimentation I decided that we would have to resort to a table for
> > the ads column and include the search (now donate) box within the div
> > that contains the four purple boxes with a % width to fix
> > this issue. I
> > lowered the % width of the donate box and increased the
> > others to bring
> > it more inline with Aarons original design. It's not perfect but it's
> > close enough.
>
> It looks fine at 700x500.  Even smaller at 640x480, it's still ok. 
> This is because there's a min-width rule specified for the content
> area.  Modern browsers should respect this rule (IE doesn't, but
> Firefox, etc. and Opera are fine).

Actually it is easy to even make IE do such a thing by introducing a 
"strut" and having a proper overflow behaviour. A strut is an invisible 
element that has the minimum with required and as such forces that this 
is the minimum.

> http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/700x500ref.png
>
> Speaking of lower resolutions, the author credits takes up the entire
> screen (http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/problems/700x500live.png).  I
> originally thought about doing it this way, but after trying with that
> same author list it didn't seem right.  Hence the design was reworked
> to use the side bar, as old Gentoo site does, for author listings.  It
> seems to work better.

Probably right. I think that some flexibility is good.

> The side bar overlapping the footer when there is minimal content is a
> known issue.  It's not as if we have the handbook in the footer. ;) 
> The alternative is to have the footer block the bottom of the side bar,
> but the implementation is much more convoluted that it's not worth it. 
> On the other hand, the side bar in the live site stops abruptly if the
> content is long. If content is the main focus, does it make sense to
> show a whole page's worth of white space just so the sidebar can
> display entirely?
>
> > Accessibilty guidelines say that all text links should be
> > underlined. I
> > made an exception for the grey menu bar for aesthetic
> > purposes but will
> > not make an exception for any other links.
>
> My thoughts exactly, although the author list is missing the
> underlines.

I think that the browser preference should be used. Most browsers 
underline by default. But if users prefer links not to be underlined, why 
not respect those users.

> In my own site logs, Netscape 4 still out numbers IE5 for Mac (go
> figure). It's a simple cost/benefit analysis and in the end is it worth
> it to support such non-standard-compliant browsers?  What message are
> we sending? --- we try to accommodate a few at the cost of the
> majority?

That's why one should use javascript to enable hacks to work around such 
broken browsers. Most users get the full behaviour, and the broken 
browser gets slightly degraded, but controlled behaviour.
>
> Background should remain white, it's much easier to work with.  To make
> it easier on the eyes, just lighten up the text a little (i.e. so it's
> not black on white which is high contrast but high contrast also
> strains the eyes after prolonged reading).  I used #515151, which is
> 81% gray.  The other point for not having colored backgrounds is that
> it looks particularly bad on laptops running on battery.  When the
> screen dims when it's not on AC, it's all over.

Also I find that the purple background on the live site makes the site too 
purple.

> > *all extraneous information and decorative news headers were removed
> > from the front page to help readability and to bring focus to the
> > information. This includes the cow image and text.
> > Overwhelming amounts
> > of information on the front page should no longer be a problem. This
> > also brings the jumppads closer to the top so new users will
> > be better
> > able to spot them.
>
> If decoration is used sparingly, it's great.  If we want to be purely
> information based, and ignore appearance and marketing, we could go
> text only.
>
I agree, we should use the decoration where not superfluous and where 
there is space. If the decoration causes space issues, it can be 
reconsidered.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Chris Case]

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Well, I wanted to give some feedback from an interesting angle. I deal with
a good number of visually impared people, including my father. I have been
working on switching most of them over to linux, specifically gentoo. After
sending both site to some, these are the problems we all agreed on:

1) Font Size.

The default fontsize on the redesign site is too large. (It's unsable for me
on a 1024x768 machine. I mean usability is kind of hard to define, but I
assure you, that reading and navigating that page isn't fun. Yes, I can drop
the size down in my browser... but I should not have to. If I do, it's a
poorly designed site, IMHO.) Now, for my father, the lareg text size
represents a new problem. He is legally blind, and uses a screen reader. The
large text size had no helpful value for him, and actually poses a problem
for a screen reader. The text is just large enough that reading lines with
the mouse becomes difficult, because there are less words per line, and it's
rather a pain to move the mouse down every line of text, just to get the
point of a paragraph. For people with screen readers, the more words on one
line, the better. Chances are they only have limited sight anyway, so while
they will be able to see the larger fonts marginally better, the ability to
get more infromation with less work is much more desirable.

***(As a note, I strongly recomend that before this site goes live, someone
downloads the demo of Window Eyes from http://www.gwmicro.com/ and goes over
the site with a fine toothed comb. You will be amazed how unusable a good
deal of sites are for people with screen readers.)***

2) Headline highlighting/background color

This is something my father brought up to me. Looking at the main page of
Aaron's site, you see that the news items are given a purple boarder, and
purple text. He said that made a world of difference for him in finding the
headlines for the news. He said that the current site he couldn't tell where
the headlines started. Also, the background color of the current site
doesn't provide enough contrast for him to be able to discern The purple
titles of the current site from the regular text. When I forced the
background to be white, like aaron's, he could find it, but it wasn't as
easy for him as finding the title and start of each article on aaron's site.
Also, We both agree that there should be two news itesm on the mian page be
default, not one. Only having one doesn't give any indication to a visually
impaired person that they should even look for more. If there's two, then
it's understood that somewhere on the page will be an archive button; so
perhaps they should take the time and effort to look for it. (Don't kid
yourselves, when you're blind, and using that little voice from your
computer to read the screen to you, you will not exort any extra effort to
find the 'More News' button. Either you find it by shear accident, or you
never see it at all.)

3) The Side Advertisements.

These *need* to be greyed out, like on aaron's site. They are so large and
colorful that any visually impared person will instantly move the mouse over
to them, and try to figure out what they are. My father was convinced they
were some sort of navigation icons, and was getting very confused when they
were taking him to non gentoo pages.  I had ot explain to him what they
were.. and that was within the first minute of visiting the page. I have
sent the site to five other visually impared people; they ALL had the same
problem. I tried sending Aaron's site to a few more I knew... no problem.
Everyone who's tried both sites agree: they greyed out ads remove 90% of the
confusion visually impared people have when visiting the site.

This is a very important concern here. Windows doesn't lend itself to
visually impared people the way linux does. While most visually impared
people do run windows, because that's what they were taught, *most* make the
switch to linux as soon as they find out there's a modern command line based
OS out there that does most of what they need. Gentoo is one of the biggest
distros out there, and it's one I recomend to any visually impared person as
a linux distro to try. I hand them a modified live CD (added a screen
reader) and let them play. In ten minutes most of them are hooked, and want
to install it on thier own systems. The gentoo website is the major reason
why most of them never do. I've tried to help mostof them out. but the old
site, and the current one both are a nightmare for visually impared
people... The new one's better, but need work. By far, aaron's reference
site is the *BEST* site most of them have seen in a long time, although even
that isn't perfect. No site is, but I really think that some of those
guidelines and decisions need rethought.

I hope this feedback is helpful to you.

Oh, as an after thought, I see a good deal of comments about "If you had a
problem, why didn't you speak up a year ago?" I personally have kept quite
because there wasn't much for me to see, until aaron posted that reference
site. What I saw there was fine, and worked well. The current one now is
rather broken from a visually impared person's standpoint. I couldn't have
spoken up a year or so ago... I didn't have anything to test.

--Chris
--

Christopher S. Case
SUNY Fredonia
Computer Science / Computer Engineering
macguyvok@gmail.com
(509) 432 - 4725 (Cellphone)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"To err is human. To forgive, divine.
To fix mistakes, now that's an Engineer."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 24 November 2005 00:33, Chris Case wrote:
> Oh, as an after thought, I see a good deal of comments about "If you
> had a problem, why didn't you speak up a year ago?" I personally have
> kept quite because there wasn't much for me to see, until aaron posted
> that reference site. What I saw there was fine, and worked well. The
> current one now is rather broken from a visually impared person's
> standpoint. I couldn't have spoken up a year or so ago... I didn't have
> anything to test.

Yesterday evening I've been playing hooky (from writing my Ph.D. thesis) 
and started to implement Aaron's reference page based on the current (as 
of yesterday) xml data. I've got the first revision of the homepage 
finished (things should be refactored a bit, but visually it is good), 
and will be working on the other parts of the stylesheet. The only thing 
I didn't do was change the ads. While indeed the purple looks better I 
have not made the change. I also shifted them a little so they would be 
more centered in the ads column (they are bigger than the ones Aaron 
made).

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Christopher Bergström]

Curtis Napier wrote:

> Aarons design uses a smaller default font, that is not acceptable from 
> an accessibility POV. The main font is at 1em and all cursory fonts 
> multipliers of 1em. The main font will remain at 1em which is the 
> standard for the accessibility guidelines. If you don't like the 
> standard font size every single graphical browser offers a font zoom 
> capability, use it.

I just asked we don't set the font size in px..

>
> The site is not XHTML it is HTML-4.01 Transitional and it passes the 
> w3c validator. Manually overriding HTML-4.01 Transitional in the w3c 
> validator is not required and any errors that it reports if you do 
> this will not be addressed. If you can come up with a good technical 
> reason why doing this would benefit anyone I will address it.
>
> Navigation and useability studies are beyond my scope. These issues 
> should have been addressed a year ago.

There always has to be a point in software were we lock on features..  
Hopefully we look at this sometime in the future.  It's my understanding 
that xhtml is a finer grained standard and will become more so in the 
future.. Allowing for a right once and preview the same across browsers 
approach.. Thus not having to "worry" so much if the site previews the 
same across any platform.  It will save time for everyone later.. (only 
mentioning)

>
> The left hand navigation column is dead. No amount of beating this 
> dead horse will resurrect it. The jumppads will remain at the bottom 
> and appear on all non-documentation pages so that those links are 
> accessible as much as possible.

I only recommended kicking a small portion of the bottom jump pads to 
the right side above the ads.  Allowing for navigation bar and menu to 
be closer together.. (imho not important)

>
> The CSS is only 12k. Why would shaving 4k off of it to make it 8k make 
> a difference to anyone?

Loads, parses and renders faster...  After the need for editing is 
done.. I think simply removing white space might accomplish this..

>
> The site is dynamically generated with XSL/XML all the pages end in 
> .xml. There are no plans to change it to .xhtml now or in the future.

I have to look at this logically..
So we are intentionally rendering HTML 4?  HTML docs being such usually 
end it .html file extension..  Unless there are some changes then should 
be just .html files.. OR update the code to be xhtml compliant and leave 
as .xml.. This doesn't really matter, but it's semantics..

It's like renaming a bzImage to Kernel.dll

In the end.. Looks better and thanks for the great work

Cheers,

C.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

[www-redesign] Re: [gentoo-dev] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Flammie Pirinen wrote:
> 2005-11-25, Curtis Napier sanoi, jotta:
> 
> 
>>I honestly thought that the changes I made were better from an 
>>accessibility standpoint. I guess I was wrong. 
> 
> 
> Not really.
> 
> 
>>So on that note, I've gone over the design and gotten it closer to 
>>Aarons's reference. [...] Check out what I did change in the meantime.
> 
> 
> Uh-oh. The usability regression from what the site was yesterday is
> unbelievable. Almost all of the texts are too small to read again, and
> the color combinations are also unreadable again.  I hope that you and
> Aaron are still going to take into account at least all the usability
> related requests from the feedback you asked, because I'd be pretty
> annoyed to see yet another web site redesign that manages to make
> original website even more unusable than it was.
> 


Sorry, I should have been a little more clear. What I meant in my last 
email is that I would get the site to match Aarons current reference and 
then he and I, working together as a team, would then address all the 
issues that were brought up during the last round of feedback. Aarons 
input as the designer will be make it so much easier to make sure those 
accessibilty/other feedack is incorporated in a way that is pleasing to 
look at and integrates with Aarons original design. This is how it 
should have been done from the beginning as I already said in my last 
email.

Sorry for any confusion.


ps. I'm moving all discussion of this to the www-redesign@gentoo.org 
mailing list. I'll start a new thread there right now. Anyone who wants 
to participate should sign up for that list.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

[www-redesign] ad color

[Curtis Napier]

I just noticed a comment about the color of the ads. The ads are 
provided by the advertiser and we can't change those. Sorry.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] ad color

[Aaron Shi]

I assume the existing site had a set of advertising guidelines hence all the
ads are the same dimensions.  If there is, couldn't we revise those
guidelines for the new site re: size and color?  To make it easy for the
existing adverstisers, we can convert the ads to fit new guidelines for them
if they provide the ad files.

If this isn't possible, then we'll just have to accept it.

Aaron

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curtis Napier [mailto:curtis119@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Friday, November 25, 2005 12:58 AM
> To: www-redesign@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: [www-redesign] ad color
> 
> I just noticed a comment about the color of the ads. The ads 
> are provided by the advertiser and we can't change those. Sorry.
> --
> www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 
> 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] Update of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Blackace]

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On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 01:40 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> If there are no more outstanding issues reported I will submit this 
> current layout for approval.

This looks GOOD.  For whatever it's worth, I fully support the changes
you've made.

Outstanding issues:

1. The primary nav ("About", "Get Gentoo", "Handbook", "Docs",
"Security", "Projects", "GWN") is shifted up such that the hover green
underlines are not aligned with the background.

2. On http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml the ads are still
shifted left leaving air between the right-hand side of the browser
window and the gray adbar background.

3. Also on http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml is there no way
to add separation to the various sections of links?

4. On http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml the line spacing
is wonky such that the underlines of links are overlapping the top of
the text on the next line. (this issue is also present in the chapter
listing of guide docs.

5. I still think the "Printer-friendly" graphic on guide docs looks
wrong next to the title...it would look better in the top-right corner
of the gray doc-info div.

http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=2#doc_chap4_sect2
^^ MAN! that looks good :)

Thanks Curtis.

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer

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[www-redesign] Current status

[Curtis Napier]

I've stopped responding to the gentoo-dev thread. We'll keep all 
discussion here.

Aaron, will you take a look at what I currently have up on the test 
server. Use my code as a base and tweak the css to your liking. I know a 
lot of what you see in my codebase is not what you would like to see but 
I made a lot of changes to make it work correctly and as easily as 
possible with the XSL template. For the time being let's stick to one 
css file.

Try to take into account the feedback we received over the past week. 
Use your own discretion and try to stick as close to your reference 
pages as possible.

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] Current status

[Curtis Napier]

Aaron, can you make a custom button for the donate box? The crappy thing 
I have there now is disgusting. ;-)


Also, see how I'm doing the news items with divs instead of tables? The 
use of tables should be limited to tabular data unless necessary. If you 
want to play around with what I have there now try to stick with divs. 
If you we can't figure out how to make it acceptable that way we can 
revert to tables as a last resort.

Thanks


Curtis
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] Current status

[Aaron Shi]

> Also, see how I'm doing the news items with divs instead of 
> tables? The 
> use of tables should be limited to tabular data unless 
> necessary. If you 
> want to play around with what I have there now try to stick 
> with divs. 
> If you we can't figure out how to make it acceptable that way we can 
> revert to tables as a last resort.

I would say that since tables are used to display relationships in data and
there are relationships in our news table (horizontally: in a row the
date/author is related to the news posting and together this is one
instance; vertically: column of date/author, column of news postings), it
makes some sense to use tables provided that the posting is only a short
abstract i.e. a few lines long.

Divs would work, but not sure if it structurally makes sense.  If using
divs, we'd have to set it up like a table to get the vertical alignments
correctly.  One div per news item as a container, then date/author in one
div floated to the left (width specified value, so we don't get the
horizontal white gap in between this and the abstract) and news posting in
another div floated to the right (width auto).  Have not tried this but it
could work.  If anything funny happens e.g. the news items containers
overlap, the style="clear:both" br may need to be used.

Aaron

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] Current status

[Aaron Shi]

> I've stopped responding to the gentoo-dev thread. We'll keep 
> all discussion here.

Good idea, I completely missed out on that other discussion.  Did not know
that the redesign was discussed on another list.

> Aaron, will you take a look at what I currently have up on 
> the test server. Use my code as a base and tweak the css to 
> your liking. I know a lot of what you see in my codebase is 
> not what you would like to see but I made a lot of changes to 
> make it work correctly and as easily as possible with the XSL 
> template. For the time being let's stick to one css file.

This looks much better!  As I mentioned in my email to you (which I just
sent moments ago), I will not be able to work on the site until January.
That's unfortunate, but I'll try to keep up with this list.

As with the CSS, I remembered that I forgot to mention one thing.  I said
that the cascade will allow us to have a separate printable page (e.g.
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepageprint.html), but what I forgot to
say is that it'll also allow the normal page to look like the printable page
if you hit print preview in your browser (i.e. if you print preview
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html it will look like the
printable page).  One of my prior comments about adding the printable CSS
line to make it printable is incorrect.  The line is in fact already there,
the only difference is that in the normal page we set the attribute
media="print" so it only takes effect in print.

I know in my reference pages I have a few lines for incorporating the
various CSS files, but in reality, we can use 1 CSS file to import all the
others.  Would this work?  Of course, very old browsers like Netscape 4 will
not be able to import the additional sheets, but then again they doesn't
handle much CSS anyway.  Really, the proper method is import, but I resorted
to linking all the CSS files individually in HTML so very old browsers will
be able to obtain the external CSS.  


Aaron

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

I got together with the project leads and we finalized some decisions. 
The site, http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org, is now in it's final state 
except for the search and donate.

The search is going to be implemented using google as a back end as an 
interim solution. The only free version of google site search that is 
available to us is the normal one that anyone can use. We are not the 
right kind of non-profit to get the free, customized search. This means 
you will be taken out of the gentoo site to a google controlled page.

The good news is that it will allow us to do a very comprehensive 
advanced search page where you can fine grain your search to any of the 
gentoo web sites. You will be able to search documents by language, 
forums, developer pages, etc.... We will also hook into the bugs and 
forum native search engines to further enhance the search. You will be 
able to specify google or forum search as the search backend when you 
search the forum.

We will be investigating alternative search engines that we can host 
ouselves so that we have maximum control. I won't be able to get around 
to that until after the other gentoo sites are migrated to the new 
design so google will be the default for a while. If anyone wants to do 
some preliminary research and start submitting suggestions I would 
appreciate it.

I'll be setting up the search over the next week or two so stay tuned.

As you can see Aarons reference site has been implemented pretty 
accurately now. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

I've had individual reports from a few key people and can safely say 
that it renders correctly in all browsers with the exception of IE5 on 
mac. I decided that it was not used enough to justify the hack it would 
require to support it and there are alternative browsers for the mac all 
the way back to OS8.X that don't have outstanding security issues as IE5 
  does. I hope the few users of this browser will understand.

There was a small bug in konqueror that I finally got sorted out, thanks 
to dangle for being my tester.

I'll report back when the search is ready for wide testing.

Thanks everybody
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[mushroomblue]

fonts got bigger. suck.

otherwise, yay for almost finished site.


On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 01:06 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> I got together with the project leads and we finalized some decisions. 
> The site, http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org, is now in it's final state 
> except for the search and donate.
> 
> The search is going to be implemented using google as a back end as an 
> interim solution. The only free version of google site search that is 
> available to us is the normal one that anyone can use. We are not the 
> right kind of non-profit to get the free, customized search. This means 
> you will be taken out of the gentoo site to a google controlled page.
> 
> The good news is that it will allow us to do a very comprehensive 
> advanced search page where you can fine grain your search to any of the 
> gentoo web sites. You will be able to search documents by language, 
> forums, developer pages, etc.... We will also hook into the bugs and 
> forum native search engines to further enhance the search. You will be 
> able to specify google or forum search as the search backend when you 
> search the forum.
> 
> We will be investigating alternative search engines that we can host 
> ouselves so that we have maximum control. I won't be able to get around 
> to that until after the other gentoo sites are migrated to the new 
> design so google will be the default for a while. If anyone wants to do 
> some preliminary research and start submitting suggestions I would 
> appreciate it.
> 
> I'll be setting up the search over the next week or two so stay tuned.
> 
> As you can see Aarons reference site has been implemented pretty 
> accurately now. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
> 
> I've had individual reports from a few key people and can safely say 
> that it renders correctly in all browsers with the exception of IE5 on 
> mac. I decided that it was not used enough to justify the hack it would 
> require to support it and there are alternative browsers for the mac all 
> the way back to OS8.X that don't have outstanding security issues as IE5 
>   does. I hope the few users of this browser will understand.
> 
> There was a small bug in konqueror that I finally got sorted out, thanks 
> to dangle for being my tester.
> 
> I'll report back when the search is ready for wide testing.
> 
> Thanks everybody

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 29 November 2005 07:09, mushroomblue wrote:
> fonts got bigger. suck.
>

I just checked it and all font sizes are relative. So if you want smaller 
fonts, tell your browser that the default font size is too big. On a note 
here, do we really want all font sizes to be relative? The fonts in for 
example the blue bar under the menu are designed to be smaller than the 
green text of the images ("MANAGE", "CUSTOMIZE", "OPTIMIZE", "INTERACT"). 
Their size now is dependent on the user font size though.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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RE: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Aaron Shi]

1.
The gray background for the jumppads and ad bar is wrong (it's the wrong
gray and for the jumppads, you can also tell that the corners are off).  It
almost seems that someone just took the graphics, turned them grayscale and
turned down the brightness in Photoshop.  Notice for the ad bar that
originally CSS was used to tile the gray bg for the ad bar, and the graphic
in the footer connects to it.  Now it's disjoint when the page is long. (And
the bit that's sticking out of the bottom right of the footer has nothing to
connect to.)  Both grays for the jumppads and ad bar are the same, a very
light gray.

2.
There is a white line (1px) between the top of the ad bar and the dark gray
bar at the top; it's not supposed to be there.  There is also a 1px white
line on the right of the ad bar between it and the scroll bar -- not
supposed to be there either.

3.
The new donate button looks sexier than the plain button.

4.
The news headlines are not vertically lined up with the author/date.

5.
For some reason, the current font is bigger, but it's not sharp?

6.
With regards to the navigation in the top right, what I said before was
*not* to make it *all* green, but rather make the *current* site's link
green (and leave the rest light purple as before), so people can tell what
site they're on.  The light purple version that Curtis did a few days ago
also had better vertical centering for those links and the arrow.  Since
they were changed to all green, the alignment is a bit off.

7.
For the content area, I'd make the margins equal on all sides.  Otherwise,
it looks unbalanced.

8.
The bg for the author list for articles should be a very light purple --
gray on light gray is kind of hard to read.  Same with code snippet bg, etc.
wherever the gray is used, please change it back to light purple. Check here
for the appropriate bg color: http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html

9.
For headings with light purple bg, I'd make give them a small padding on all
sides, i.e. so the characters are not right up against the edges.  The
original intent for the bg was *not* to make it for all headings, but rather
*for news headings only* to highlight them on the front page where obviously
the content is not the main attraction (but none the less news headings are
important info and deserved to be put on par with the rest of the front
page).  The news headings should be clickable, since what's displayed on the
front is only an abstract and it'll lead to the full article.

10.
While the bg for headings look okay, they seem a bit counter intuitive.  The
green headings are main headings, and hence should be bigger and more
prominent.  Right now, the purple subheadings are the same size as the green
ones and appear more prominent with the bg highlighting it.  This is
opposite of what they should be doing and it's not user friendly.  Please
refer to http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html to see how headings
should be used.

11.
Double check the colors for the warnings/important/notes etc., e.g.
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/openmosix-howto.xml  Important and note
are hard to read due to their color.

12.
Consistency is also a concern, things look in symphony when they are
consistent.  There are a lot of inconsistencies that present serious
usability concerns.

Heading in the right direction though. ;)

> I've had individual reports from a few key people and can 
> safely say that it renders correctly in all browsers with the 
> exception of IE5 on mac. I decided that it was not used 
> enough to justify the hack it would require to support it and 
> there are alternative browsers for the mac all the way back 
> to OS8.X that don't have outstanding security issues as IE5
>   does. I hope the few users of this browser will understand.

Fully agree with this decision.


Aaron




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curtis Napier [mailto:curtis119@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 10:06 PM
> To: www-redesign@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
> 
> I got together with the project leads and we finalized some 
> decisions. 
> The site, http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org, is now in it's final 
> state except for the search and donate.
> 
> The search is going to be implemented using google as a back 
> end as an interim solution. The only free version of google 
> site search that is available to us is the normal one that 
> anyone can use. We are not the right kind of non-profit to 
> get the free, customized search. This means you will be taken 
> out of the gentoo site to a google controlled page.
> 
> The good news is that it will allow us to do a very 
> comprehensive advanced search page where you can fine grain 
> your search to any of the gentoo web sites. You will be able 
> to search documents by language, forums, developer pages, 
> etc.... We will also hook into the bugs and forum native 
> search engines to further enhance the search. You will be 
> able to specify google or forum search as the search backend 
> when you search the forum.
> 
> We will be investigating alternative search engines that we 
> can host ouselves so that we have maximum control. I won't be 
> able to get around to that until after the other gentoo sites 
> are migrated to the new design so google will be the default 
> for a while. If anyone wants to do some preliminary research 
> and start submitting suggestions I would appreciate it.
> 
> I'll be setting up the search over the next week or two so stay tuned.
> 
> As you can see Aarons reference site has been implemented 
> pretty accurately now. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
> 
> I've had individual reports from a few key people and can 
> safely say that it renders correctly in all browsers with the 
> exception of IE5 on mac. I decided that it was not used 
> enough to justify the hack it would require to support it and 
> there are alternative browsers for the mac all the way back 
> to OS8.X that don't have outstanding security issues as IE5
>   does. I hope the few users of this browser will understand.
> 
> There was a small bug in konqueror that I finally got sorted 
> out, thanks to dangle for being my tester.
> 
> I'll report back when the search is ready for wide testing.
> 
> Thanks everybody
> --
> www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 
> 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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> 3.
> The new donate button looks sexier than the plain button.

It should give some kind of feedback. When I clicked on it, I had no way 
of knowing that I actually clicked on it. Perhaps adding an extra style 
rule for this would be a good idea (Yeah, IE doesn't support that, it's 
broken).
> 9.
> For headings with light purple bg, I'd make give them a small padding
> on all sides, i.e. so the characters are not right up against the
> edges.  The original intent for the bg was *not* to make it for all
> headings, but rather *for news headings only* to highlight them on the
> front page where obviously the content is not the main attraction (but
> none the less news headings are important info and deserved to be put
> on par with the rest of the front page).  The news headings should be
> clickable, since what's displayed on the front is only an abstract and
> it'll lead to the full article.
>
This is funny as the current system actually supports it, but current news 
messages rarely carry an abstract. I agree with you that we should do 
this in the future, and think that the new system should also support it.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 29 November 2005 09:57, Aaron Shi wrote:

Aaron,

what do you think about giving the "Donate" box also a nice green heading? 
I think that would look good and in line with the rest.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[mushroomblue]

and maybe align the entire cell with the advertisements bar again?

On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 10:21 +0100, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 November 2005 09:57, Aaron Shi wrote:
> 
> Aaron,
> 
> what do you think about giving the "Donate" box also a nice green heading? 
> I think that would look good and in line with the rest.
> 
> Paul
> 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Aaron Shi]

There are a lot of things I'd like to do, such as what both of you
mentioned, but right now the timing isn't very good -- things are coming
down to the wire for me.  I'll definitely get to work on the issues (which
I've now accumulated in my mailbox) over the holidays and into January.

For the graphic headings, in my reference I forgot to implement the image
replacement techique (i.e. what I did for the Gentoo logo), such that for
text browsers and for printing purposes, we can have text there instead of
graphics.  I had not created a print template for the front page as I doubt
many people will print the front page, but completenesssakes I should've
done it.  Actually, just looking at the current code, it seemed that the
image replacement was removed in the current version.  If you want to see
what I meant, go to http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html and hit
print preview.  You should see the GENTOO LINUX text at the top of the page.
The text is there, just hidden when using a modern graphical browser, but
displayed for text browsers/for printing purposes.

As for the alignment, I really haven't kept up with the changes in CSS
(didn't realize that the project was still alive, but being discussed on a
different list, until a few days ago).  Much has been changed from my
reference CSS, I'd need to look it over.  That'll be another thing on the
list for January.

For now, the best I can do is respond to the list and apologize if the
responses seem rushed. 

Aaron 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: mushroomblue [mailto:mushroomblue@elazulspad.net] 
> Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:22 AM
> To: www-redesign@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
> 
> and maybe align the entire cell with the advertisements bar again?
> 
> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 10:21 +0100, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> > On Tuesday 29 November 2005 09:57, Aaron Shi wrote:
> > 
> > Aaron,
> > 
> > what do you think about giving the "Donate" box also a nice 
> green heading? 
> > I think that would look good and in line with the rest.
> > 
> > Paul
> > 
> 
> --
> www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 
> 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 29 November 2005 10:46, Aaron Shi wrote:
> For the graphic headings, in my reference I forgot to implement the
> image replacement techique (i.e. what I did for the Gentoo logo), such
> that for text browsers and for printing purposes, we can have text
> there instead of graphics.  I had not created a print template for the
> front page as I doubt many people will print the front page, but
> completenesssakes I should've done it.  Actually, just looking at the
> current code, it seemed that the image replacement was removed in the
> current version.  If you want to see what I meant, go to
> http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/guidepage.html and hit print preview. 
> You should see the GENTOO LINUX text at the top of the page. The text
> is there, just hidden when using a modern graphical browser, but
> displayed for text browsers/for printing purposes.

The problem is that your particular technique doesn't work for at least 
konqueror. It's probably better to use <object> tags as advertised by the 
W3C. While it doesn't work with very old browsers like NS 4, it should 
work with all modern ones, and is the advertised way of doing things.

> As for the alignment, I really haven't kept up with the changes in CSS
> (didn't realize that the project was still alive, but being discussed
> on a different list, until a few days ago).  Much has been changed from
> my reference CSS, I'd need to look it over.  That'll be another thing
> on the list for January.
>
> For now, the best I can do is respond to the list and apologize if the
> responses seem rushed.

No problem, the most important thing is that the website becomes 
"perfect". I don't mind that happening after the launch (as long as it 
doesn't suck), as long as it happens sometime. The current push is just 
because it is probably easier to do things right in the beginning than to 
fix it up after the fact.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 29 November 2005 07:06, Curtis Napier wrote:
> I got together with the project leads and we finalized some decisions.
> The site, http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org, is now in it's final state
> except for the search and donate.

Two things. Perhaps we should change the text of the "GWN" link to 
something like "Newsletter" which newbee's will also understand. And 
maybe a little bit more space between the copyright notice and the 
"questions, comments?" text. That way it will be more clear that the 
email adress is for questions and comments.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Xavier Neys]

Curtis Napier wrote:
> This has been cross posted to gentoo-dev and www-redesign.
> 
> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

Could you update the site with the current news items, news index, /doc/en/, 
/doc/fr/, missing files in /xsl/, /news/en/ (including GWNs)?

I posted a few comments with screen caps at 
http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/wwwredesign/

Besides, is there any hope of using a background colour in <th> that allows to 
read <c> and <brite>?
Is there any reason not to use HTML's <th> for our GuideXML's <th>? I never 
bothered to change the current site because I hoped this redesign would fix it.


Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/  French & Internationalisation Lead
\  http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
/\
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Xavier Neys wrote:
> 
> Could you update the site with the current news items, news index, 
> /doc/en/, /doc/fr/, missing files in /xsl/, /news/en/ (including GWNs)?
> 

Done.


> I posted a few comments with screen caps at 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/wwwredesign/
> 

I looked at your comments, some of the stuff was already fixed. Give me 
a few days to look into the rest of it.

> Besides, is there any hope of using a background colour in <th> that 
> allows to read <c> and <brite>?

I could use the same light greyish-purple that is the background for ads 
and the jumppads and authors. That should show the <c> and <brite> 
pretty well. What do you think?

> Is there any reason not to use HTML's <th> for our GuideXML's <th>? I 
> never bothered to change the current site because I hoped this redesign 
> would fix it.
> 


I had <th> about 6 months ago and swift made me change it back, he was 
afraid of backwards compatibility and I didn't feel like pushing the 
issue at the time. I'll put it back to <th> again and see what he has to 
say about it. Hopefully his concerns can be alleviated.

> 
> Wkr,

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 10:02:20PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> I had <th> about 6 months ago and swift made me change it back, he was 
> afraid of backwards compatibility and I didn't feel like pushing the 
> issue at the time.

I did? Sorry about that then, I can't remember it and I can't see any reason
why <th> wouldn't be compatible for our <th>s.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Documentation Project Lead  |  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Xavier Neys]

Curtis Napier wrote:
> Xavier Neys wrote:
> 
>> I posted a few comments with screen caps at 
>> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/wwwredesign/
> 
> I looked at your comments, some of the stuff was already fixed. Give me 
> a few days to look into the rest of it.

Take your time. I've noticed some changes indeed.
Alignment on main page: changed and fixed,
Titling: changed and *not* fixed

http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4
The 3 title levels are still inconsistent:
"4. Preparing the Disks" (OK)
"4.a. Introduction to Block Devices" (looks like normal text)
"Block Devices" (bolder, coloured, w/ coloured background)

>> Besides, is there any hope of using a background colour in <th> that 
>> allows to read <c> and <brite>?
> 
> I could use the same light greyish-purple that is the background for ads 
> and the jumppads and authors. That should show the <c> and <brite> 
> pretty well. What do you think?

Whatever colour, as long as it's readable. Maybe <ti> could also be more 
readable than they are at the moment.

 > neysx, do you see any technical bugs that need to be fixed (other than
 > the stuff you linked to in your previous mail)?

Outdated translation warnings do not seem to work:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/fr/xml-guide.xml
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/fr/xml-guide.xml

Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml

 > ... and an email to the docs-team icon added.

Very bad idea, at least the address is.
docs-team is an alias that should only be used by bugzilla to notify GDP 
members. GDP is not going to maintain the site itself, GDP definitely does not 
want to be mailed about any issues outside of /doc/*
Use an appropriate address or none at all.
FYI, some of us probably move mails to docs-team that do not come from 
bugzilla straight to /dev/null. At least I do :)

 > ramereth, swift and klieber: what do you think? I would like to have
 > this site up and running before christmas, is that feasible?

Doing important changes when some (many?) guys are less available or away for 
holidays might not be a very good idea.


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

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Xavier Neys wrote:
> Outdated translation warnings do not seem to work:
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/fr/xml-guide.xml
> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/fr/xml-guide.xml
> 

fixed. I had it working previously and it must have been left out during 
one of the reworkings. It always worked in the print version.

> Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml

I forgot to copy over the image. fixed.

> 
>  > ... and an email to the docs-team icon added.
> 
> Very bad idea, at least the address is.
> docs-team is an alias that should only be used by bugzilla to notify GDP 
> members. GDP is not going to maintain the site itself, GDP definitely 
> does not want to be mailed about any issues outside of /doc/*
> Use an appropriate address or none at all.
> FYI, some of us probably move mails to docs-team that do not come from 
> bugzilla straight to /dev/null. At least I do :)

That should have been gentoo-doc@gentoo.org. fixed. Is this good or 
should I use a different address? This only shows up on pages that use 
/guide or /book. I can always just remove it if you don't want it or if 
we can't come up with an acceptable address. The www@gentoo.org is in 
the footer of every page as well. Thoughts?

> 
>  > ramereth, swift and klieber: what do you think? I would like to have
>  > this site up and running before christmas, is that feasible?
> 
> Doing important changes when some (many?) guys are less available or 
> away for holidays might not be a very good idea.

Normally I would agree with you but I've been doing this for so long now 
I'm really itching to get it up and move on to the other sites. I know I 
know, it shouldn't matter what I'm "itching" to do and only the quality 
of the work should be considered. If all of us involved don't think we 
can get this up by the New Year then so be it but I really want to try.

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 01:09:12PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> That should have been gentoo-doc@gentoo.org. fixed. Is this good or 
> should I use a different address? This only shows up on pages that use 
> /guide or /book. I can always just remove it if you don't want it or if 
> we can't come up with an acceptable address. The www@gentoo.org is in 
> the footer of every page as well. Thoughts?

The gentoo-doc address is a mailinglist where you can't post to unless
you're subscribed, so that's not feasible too. I would stick with the
www@gentoo.org alias; I'm subscribed to it and answer most
documentation-related mails within 3 days generally (one to two days if I
don't need to look something up outside Gentoo's web site).

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Documentation Project Lead  |  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 01:09:12PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> 
>>That should have been gentoo-doc@gentoo.org. fixed. Is this good or 
>>should I use a different address? This only shows up on pages that use 
>>/guide or /book. I can always just remove it if you don't want it or if 
>>we can't come up with an acceptable address. The www@gentoo.org is in 
>>the footer of every page as well. Thoughts?
> 
> 
> The gentoo-doc address is a mailinglist where you can't post to unless
> you're subscribed, so that's not feasible too. I would stick with the
> www@gentoo.org alias; I'm subscribed to it and answer most
> documentation-related mails within 3 days generally (one to two days if I
> don't need to look something up outside Gentoo's web site).
> 
> Wkr,
>       Sven Vermeulen
> 

Is this a public mailing list that anyone can join? I don't see it on 
the lists page. If it's public than maybe a few of us should sign up to 
it and help answer documentation related questions. If it's one of those 
private ones that infra has to set you up on than maybe a few of us 
should be put on it.

I actually thought of this before. I should be signed up to it for at 
least a few months after the site goes live. Even if we don't put it on 
every docs page it is still going to be in the footer. We will probably 
get a lot of feedback about the new site from that address at first and 
I can help take the load off of you by answering those questions.

What do you think swift?
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 02:38:36PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> Is this a public mailing list that anyone can join? I don't see it on 
> the lists page. If it's public than maybe a few of us should sign up to 
> it and help answer documentation related questions. If it's one of those 
> private ones that infra has to set you up on than maybe a few of us 
> should be put on it.

It is an alias you should be able to join like any other aliases
(/var/mail/misc/aliases/www). At this moment, Kurt and I are well able to
answer all questions (support gets redirected to forums and such, release to
releng, documentation to docs, ...). Perhaps, if you join, you might want to
wait a few days to see how things progress.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Documentation Project Lead  |  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Xavier Neys]

Curtis Napier wrote:
> Xavier Neys wrote:
> 
>> Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
>> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
> 
> I forgot to copy over the image. fixed.

The xml image is underlined and it's darn ugly IMHO.

>>  > ... and an email to the docs-team icon added.
>>
>> Very bad idea, at least the address is.
>> docs-team is an alias that should only be used by bugzilla to notify 
>> GDP members. GDP is not going to maintain the site itself, GDP 
>> definitely does not want to be mailed about any issues outside of /doc/*
>> Use an appropriate address or none at all.
>> FYI, some of us probably move mails to docs-team that do not come from 
>> bugzilla straight to /dev/null. At least I do :)
> 
> 
> That should have been gentoo-doc@gentoo.org. fixed. Is this good or 
> should I use a different address? This only shows up on pages that use 
> /guide or /book. I can always just remove it if you don't want it or if 
> we can't come up with an acceptable address. The www@gentoo.org is in 
> the footer of every page as well. Thoughts?

gentoo-doc@g.o was even worse, good to see it's been removed.

>>  > ramereth, swift and klieber: what do you think? I would like to have
>>  > this site up and running before christmas, is that feasible?
>>
>> Doing important changes when some (many?) guys are less available or 
>> away for holidays might not be a very good idea.
> 
> 
> Normally I would agree with you but I've been doing this for so long now 
> I'm really itching to get it up and move on to the other sites. I know I 
> know, it shouldn't matter what I'm "itching" to do and only the quality 
> of the work should be considered. If all of us involved don't think we 
> can get this up by the New Year then so be it but I really want to try.

Good to see we agree on it being released when it's ready and all known 
glitches have been solved.
Besides, you should make sure the right people will be available to handle the 
feedback & bugs that will probably come, and that includes you.
Bugs like
http://bugs.gentoo.org/114897 (link to /doc/en/list.xml on front page) or
http://bugs.gentoo.org/113796 (Truncated code samples)
or anything that has to do with html/css will end up on your lap.


Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/  French & Internationalisation Lead
\  http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
/\
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Xavier Neys]

Xavier Neys wrote:
> Curtis Napier wrote:
> 
>> Xavier Neys wrote:
>>
>>> Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
>>> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>>> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>>
>> I forgot to copy over the image. fixed.
> 
> The xml image is underlined and it's darn ugly IMHO.

It's even worse on printable pages:
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml?style=printable


Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/  French & Internationalisation Lead
\  http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
/\
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Xavier Neys wrote:
> 
> I posted a few comments with screen caps at 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/wwwredesign/
> 

This is 11 points, I'll address them in order:

1.1 previously fixed.

1.2 changed it to 6 news items. I was following Aarons layout when I 
created the More News page. It shows all the old news right back to the 
beginning instead of just a few old ones. I can easily change it to have 
only a few older news items follow the 6 main ones with just a title 
that is clickable. What does everyone think of this? I like the More 
News personally but it makes no difference to me.

1.3 fixed

2. This design/layout does not lend itself very well to font resizing. 
It has layered divs that are fixed sizes in order to make it look good 
at the default font. Pumping up the font to 120% ("Larger" in IE) at 
800x600 is still a good layout. It's only when you size the font higher 
than that or make the window smaller that problems occur. At just a few 
pixels wider than 800 you can pump the font up to 150% ("Largest" in IE) 
without breaking the layout. Is anyone really going to be looking at it 
at such huge font sizes with such a tiny window? If you need to make the 
fonts 150% larger in order to see them you will most likely be making 
the window larger as well. I don't see a problem with it to be honest. 
What are some other opinions, suggestions, ideas on the subject?

3. fixed

4.1 fixed

4.2 The nav bar is within the /xsl/handbook.xsl file. I was told not to 
touch that file. I take your suggestion to change the nav bar as 
permission to touch it now. Swift, if you still want me to not touch the 
handbook let me know and I'll drop in the unchanged one. I have started 
experimenting with how to make that nav bar better, if anyone has any 
ideas let me know.

5. fixed (I think). What do you think of those?

6.1 fixed

6.2 fixed

7.1 same as 6.2

7.2 I changed the background color to white to match the reference 
design. The colored title is now more visible. Is this acceptable?

8. fixed

9. That table was being rendered by the glsa-latest template instead of 
the normal table template and wasn't adding "class="ntable", fixed.

10. fixed.

11. those borders weren't supposed to be there anyway. fixed in normal 
and print css files.


> Besides, is there any hope of using a background colour in <th> that 
> allows to read <c> and <brite>?

Changed this to the light purple. Check it out and give me some feedback.


> Is there any reason not to use HTML's <th> for our GuideXML's <th>? I 
> never bothered to change the current site because I hoped this redesign 
> would fix it.

Sven Vermeulen wrote:
 > On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 10:02:20PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
 >
 >>I had <th> about 6 months ago and swift made me change it back, he was
 >>afraid of backwards compatibility and I didn't feel like pushing the
 >>issue at the time.
 >
 >
 > I did? Sorry about that then, I can't remember it and I can't see any 
reason
 > why <th> wouldn't be compatible for our <th>s.

It's been changed to <th>, thanks swift.

These changes and a few other minor ones have changed the look of the 
site a little bit. If everyone could take a look at the major pages and 
let me know what you think. Thanks.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 11:20:02PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> 4.2 The nav bar is within the /xsl/handbook.xsl file. I was told not to 
> touch that file. I take your suggestion to change the nav bar as 
> permission to touch it now. Swift, if you still want me to not touch the 
> handbook let me know and I'll drop in the unchanged one. I have started 
> experimenting with how to make that nav bar better, if anyone has any 
> ideas let me know.

Well, improvements are always possible, especially for the navigation bar as
it's quite ugly. So sure, try ahead. Don't touch the functionality though,
we shouldn't have any GuideXML changes.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen
      
-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Documentation Project Lead  |  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Xavier Neys]

Curtis Napier wrote:
> Xavier Neys wrote:
> 
>>
>> I posted a few comments with screen caps at 
>> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/wwwredesign/
>>
> 
> This is 11 points, I'll address them in order:
> 
> 1.1 previously fixed.
> 
> 1.2 changed it to 6 news items. 
More than 2 is better IMO. Thanks.
You did not answer "Why use a morenews.xml that requires a DTD change to add a 
new ID even though that attribute is no longer used anywhere else?"

I prefer a list of links to older news just like on the current site, but 
obviously not crammed in the left margin anymore.
I you choose the "more news" approach, fair enough, but why use an extra 
/main/en/morenews.xml file with an extra ID that has to be defined in the DTD 
even though those IDs are not use anymore and extra logic in the xsl?
All you need is a "?newsitemcount=20" link.

> 
> 2. This design/layout does not lend itself very well to font resizing.

Fair enough. It feels weird that some much emphasis has been put on 
accessibility but a site that does not allow visually-impaired users to grow 
their fonts is OK.

> It has layered divs that are fixed sizes in order to make it look good 
> at the default font.

How do you know what the users' default font size is?

Pumping up the font to 120% ("Larger" in IE) at
> 800x600 is still a good layout. It's only when you size the font higher 
> than that or make the window smaller that problems occur. At just a few 
> pixels wider than 800 you can pump the font up to 150% ("Largest" in IE) 
> without breaking the layout. Is anyone really going to be looking at it 
> at such huge font sizes with such a tiny window?

That tiny window was 860x894

> 4.2 The nav bar is within the /xsl/handbook.xsl file. I was told not to 
> touch that file. I take your suggestion to change the nav bar as 
> permission to touch it now. Swift, if you still want me to not touch the 
> handbook let me know and I'll drop in the unchanged one. I have started 
> experimenting with how to make that nav bar better, if anyone has any 
> ideas let me know.

Improving could be done, simply removing the <hr>'s is not an improvement.
Anyway, this should not be a requirement to more on with this project IMO.

> 5. fixed (I think). What do you think of those?

http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4

2nd & 3rd level title look better.
I can't say as much of the top titles :(

BTW, numbered chapters in the handbook index would be better IMO 
(http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml)

Besides, guides start with an unordered list, book chapters start with a 
numbered list. Neither has any "Content" title.

Wkr,
-- 
/  Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/  French & Internationalisation Lead
\  http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
/\
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

 > Xavier Neys wrote:
 >
 >> Curtis Napier wrote:
 >>
 >>> Xavier Neys wrote:
 >>>
 >>>> Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
 >>>> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
 >>>> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
 >>>
 >>>
 >>> I forgot to copy over the image. fixed.
 >>
 >>
 >> The xml image is underlined and it's darn ugly IMHO.
 >
 >
 > It's even worse on printable pages:
 > http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml?style=printable

Is it OK now?

> Xavier Neys wrote:
> 
> I prefer a list of links to older news just like on the current site, 
> but obviously not crammed in the left margin anymore.
> I you choose the "more news" approach, fair enough, but why use an extra 
> /main/en/morenews.xml file with an extra ID that has to be defined in 
> the DTD even though those IDs are not use anymore and extra logic in the 
> xsl?
> All you need is a "?newsitemcount=20" link.
> 

I went with the newsitemcount solution. Why didn't I think of that? Oh 
well, it's fixed now.

>>
>> 2. This design/layout does not lend itself very well to font resizing.
> 
> 
> Fair enough. It feels weird that some much emphasis has been put on 
> accessibility but a site that does not allow visually-impaired users to 
> grow their fonts is OK.
> 

I'm working on this one. I think after the past year of this I have 
started to lose sight of a few major principals and have gotten 
sidetracked. I stepped back today and really looked at everything and I 
made some major changes to the underlying structure in the content area 
that will improve the way it handles increased font sizes/small windows. 
I'm still working on the menu but I should have it done by tomorrow.

More about this at the end of this mail.

>> 4.2 The nav bar is within the /xsl/handbook.xsl file. I was told not 
>> to touch that file. I take your suggestion to change the nav bar as 
>> permission to touch it now. Swift, if you still want me to not touch 
>> the handbook let me know and I'll drop in the unchanged one. I have 
>> started experimenting with how to make that nav bar better, if anyone 
>> has any ideas let me know.
> 
> 
> Improving could be done, simply removing the <hr>'s is not an improvement.
> Anyway, this should not be a requirement to more on with this project IMO.
> 

I'm still working on the handbook menu, anybody have any ideas? I'm 
going to try the green arrows somehow or other unless someone can come 
up with something better.


> 2nd & 3rd level title look better.
> I can't say as much of the top titles :(
> 

How are the titles now?

> BTW, numbered chapters in the handbook index would be better IMO 
> (http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml)
> 
> Besides, guides start with an unordered list, book chapters start with a 
> numbered list. Neither has any "Content" title.
> 

I made all the content lists numbered/lettered and added "Content:" to 
them. Look at the Handbook (the main handbook index AND the content) and 
a guide and see what you think. Is this good?

-------------------------------------

I made a major change to the content area. I did this to address the 
problem of "Dead Space" under the ad bar that several people have 
complained about and to help make the site degrade properly when fonts 
are increased or the window is small.

Doing this caused a problem with block items overlapping the ads. This 
is because in order to get text to wrap under it (ad bar) I had to float 
it instead of absolutely positioning it. Items like: warning, important, 
note and codetables had to change the way the title is done from a div 
to a span to keep the background color from stretching across the page 
and overlapping the ads. The bottom part of them is now a <p> instead of 
a div for the same reason. The header will now only have a colored 
background directly under the text instead of a banner that goes across 
the page. Other than that it still looks the same.

Look for this in the next few days: I'm going to be making a change to 
the way the menu works (not the way it looks, only the HTML that renders 
it). The change will make it degrade more gracefully with larger fonts 
or in small windows. As usual IE is giving me lots of headaches or I 
would already have it done.

Thanks for bringing this up neysx. You are right, if I am going to focus 
on accessibility I need to apply it everywhere and not selectivly.

It's all coming together now thanks to the excellent feedback. Keep it 
coming people! :-)

-Curtis
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 09:12:22PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> I'm still working on the handbook menu, anybody have any ideas? I'm 
> going to try the green arrows somehow or other unless someone can come 
> up with something better.

I deliberately didn't use images because the handbook is read by many using
a console browser (links/lynx) since the document contains installation
instructions (and no graphical browser is available during the
installation).

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Gentoo Foundation Trustee          |  http://foundation.gentoo.org
  Gentoo Documentation Project Lead  |  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp
  Gentoo Council Member  

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 09:12:22PM -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> 
>>I'm still working on the handbook menu, anybody have any ideas? I'm 
>>going to try the green arrows somehow or other unless someone can come 
>>up with something better.
> 
> 
> I deliberately didn't use images because the handbook is read by many using
> a console browser (links/lynx) since the document contains installation
> instructions (and no graphical browser is available during the
> installation).
> 
> Wkr,
>       Sven Vermeulen
> 

I was planning on making the green arrows have a "> OR <" in the alt tag 
so it should still look good on a text browser. Is that acceptable?

I may end up using text-only anyway. I still have to play with it and 
see what looks best. If you *want* me to only use text then let me know, 
not a problem.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Blackace]

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On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 06:06 +0100, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> I deliberately didn't use images because the handbook is read by many using
> a console browser (links/lynx) since the document contains installation
> instructions (and no graphical browser is available during the
> installation).

links2 with framebuffer support has been available on our installcds for
a long time now.  And whether people use links2's graphics mode or text
mode is irrelevant since we can keep the less-than and greater-than
symbols in the img element's alt attribute, which both links2 and lynx
display in the place of an image.

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Daniel Wahlgren]

Curtis Napier wrote:
> I made all the content lists numbered/lettered and added "Content:" to 
> them. Look at the Handbook (the main handbook index AND the content) 
> and a guide and see what you think. Is this good?
It's better in my opinion, but there is still a lot of whitespace below 
it. (Is the green menu supposed to have "MAIN" so far away from the rest 
of the menuitems?)
http://www.tadasweden.com/images/Gentoo-redesign01.png


> -------------------------------------
>
> I made a major change to the content area. I did this to address the 
> problem of "Dead Space" under the ad bar that several people have 
> complained about and to help make the site degrade properly when fonts 
> are increased or the window is small.
>
> Doing this caused a problem with block items overlapping the ads. This 
> is because in order to get text to wrap under it (ad bar) I had to 
> float it instead of absolutely positioning it. Items like: warning, 
> important, note and codetables had to change the way the title is done 
> from a div to a span to keep the background color from stretching 
> across the page and overlapping the ads. The bottom part of them is 
> now a <p> instead of a div for the same reason. The header will now 
> only have a colored background directly under the text instead of a 
> banner that goes across the page. Other than that it still looks the 
> same.
The bottom doesn't look quite right either.
http://www.tadasweden.com/images/Gentoo-redesign02.png
Too much whitespace.

Great work though! Cheers for all the effort!
/Aridhol
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Sorry about the padding issue. I was experimenting. It's back to the way 
it's supposed to be.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Aaron Shi]

The lack of adequate margins for content and the adbar is visually
appalling.  We might as well remove all evidence of space such that all text
and images are touching all other elements, edges, containers and each other
so that we maximize screen estate and return-per-square-inch if that's the
(wrong) direction we're going.  =( 

There are only a few occasions that warrant margin minimization, e.g.
printing borderless photos on paper.  The standard rule of thumb for text on
screen is 0.5 inches (apparent).  At least line up the left edge of the
content text with the Gentoo logo.  If you do, you'll notice that the Gentoo
logo is lined up with the text and lined up with the credit logo at the
bottom (the way it's intended).  From there, logic dictates that whatever
margin's on the left should be mirrored on the right (unless you're
Picasso).  Margin on top and bottom should be at least as large as the ones
on the side.  As for the adbar, all I can say is, you fit the furniture into
the house, not the house onto the furniture.  Ads are secondary or way down
the list, why are we compromising the main objectives of the site over
sub-sub-sub items?

Turning margins back on would be a good idea...  ;)


P.S. Might also be a good idea to strategically position (code/structure
wise) the nav/content/ad/footer/etc. areas.  To see what I mean, try viewing
the reference pages (i.e. main and guidepage) in links/lynx.  Positioning in
graphical browsers should be determined via CSS, while text browsers that
can't do CSS will still render the page in a logical layout.  The current
site at wwwredesign when viewed through a text browser such as Links, the
main page starts with navigation (ok), then the 4 boxes and search (but no
headings so they look like a giant run on), then a half page of ads, then
content (not labelled as news / lack of heading), then jump pads (all 3
appears as 1 giant list with no headings/divisions).

Sven mentioned something about text browsers links/lynx and I think he's
absolutely right in that they should not be forgotten.  Don't know what the
current LiveCD comes with, but the ones I've had only had text-only links
and I remember how hard it was to use the old Gentoo site while I was
browsing the installations docs etc.  E.g. the commands and crucial steps
are not highlighted in anyway and appears as normal text within a sentence
or due to spacing issues appear as part of a paragraph.  I remember I've
wasted a lot of time when important things were overlooked.  

In this new site, I tried to make it text-only friendly, hence the
deprecated <b> and <i> tags (which I used CSS to cancel out for modern
browsers), because whatever Links I had (0.9.4?) only lighted those tags
(<b> was white and <i> was teal - couldn't specify these values, <a> was
specified fuscia - closest to purple that Links could recognize - and stands
out a whole lot too).  While it may seem superflous for modern browsers, it
doesn't affect them in any way at all, while on the other hand it
significantly enhances the browsing experience for text-only browsers.  I
noticed that a few text-friendly artifacts were left behind when all the
text-friendly features were stripped during implementation, if we're
disregarding text browsers we should remove those artifacts as to not
confuse anyone.  E.g. the ", Gentoo's main site" bit which was used to
describe the site indicator (which now no longer functions/appears as
originally intend), and makes no sense as it current appears at wwwredesign.


The search box seems a little incomplete without a "Go"/"Find" button.
Personally, I don't really care for such a button, but how many
(well-designed) sites with a search function do you find without a
complementary "Go" button of some sort?  Again, we're trying to be intuitive
since empirical evidence suggests that such buttons haven't become obsolete
because they do add value, i.e. there are people who'll freak out without
them.

Aaron


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curtis Napier [mailto:curtis119@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 6:12 PM
> To: www-redesign@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
> 
>  > Xavier Neys wrote:
>  >
>  >> Curtis Napier wrote:
>  >>
>  >>> Xavier Neys wrote:
>  >>>
>  >>>> Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
>  >>>> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>  >>>> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>  >>>
>  >>>
>  >>> I forgot to copy over the image. fixed.
>  >>
>  >>
>  >> The xml image is underlined and it's darn ugly IMHO.
>  >
>  >
>  > It's even worse on printable pages:
>  > http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml?style=printable
> 
> Is it OK now?
> 
> > Xavier Neys wrote:
> > 
> > I prefer a list of links to older news just like on the 
> current site, 
> > but obviously not crammed in the left margin anymore.
> > I you choose the "more news" approach, fair enough, but why use an 
> > extra /main/en/morenews.xml file with an extra ID that has to be 
> > defined in the DTD even though those IDs are not use 
> anymore and extra 
> > logic in the xsl?
> > All you need is a "?newsitemcount=20" link.
> > 
> 
> I went with the newsitemcount solution. Why didn't I think of 
> that? Oh well, it's fixed now.
> 
> >>
> >> 2. This design/layout does not lend itself very well to 
> font resizing.
> > 
> > 
> > Fair enough. It feels weird that some much emphasis has been put on 
> > accessibility but a site that does not allow 
> visually-impaired users 
> > to grow their fonts is OK.
> > 
> 
> I'm working on this one. I think after the past year of this 
> I have started to lose sight of a few major principals and 
> have gotten sidetracked. I stepped back today and really 
> looked at everything and I made some major changes to the 
> underlying structure in the content area that will improve 
> the way it handles increased font sizes/small windows. 
> I'm still working on the menu but I should have it done by tomorrow.
> 
> More about this at the end of this mail.
> 
> >> 4.2 The nav bar is within the /xsl/handbook.xsl file. I 
> was told not 
> >> to touch that file. I take your suggestion to change the 
> nav bar as 
> >> permission to touch it now. Swift, if you still want me to 
> not touch 
> >> the handbook let me know and I'll drop in the unchanged 
> one. I have 
> >> started experimenting with how to make that nav bar 
> better, if anyone 
> >> has any ideas let me know.
> > 
> > 
> > Improving could be done, simply removing the <hr>'s is not 
> an improvement.
> > Anyway, this should not be a requirement to more on with 
> this project IMO.
> > 
> 
> I'm still working on the handbook menu, anybody have any 
> ideas? I'm going to try the green arrows somehow or other 
> unless someone can come up with something better.
> 
> 
> > 2nd & 3rd level title look better.
> > I can't say as much of the top titles :(
> > 
> 
> How are the titles now?
> 
> > BTW, numbered chapters in the handbook index would be better IMO
> > (http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml)
> > 
> > Besides, guides start with an unordered list, book chapters 
> start with 
> > a numbered list. Neither has any "Content" title.
> > 
> 
> I made all the content lists numbered/lettered and added 
> "Content:" to them. Look at the Handbook (the main handbook 
> index AND the content) and a guide and see what you think. Is 
> this good?
> 
> -------------------------------------
> 
> I made a major change to the content area. I did this to 
> address the problem of "Dead Space" under the ad bar that 
> several people have complained about and to help make the 
> site degrade properly when fonts are increased or the window is small.
> 
> Doing this caused a problem with block items overlapping the 
> ads. This is because in order to get text to wrap under it 
> (ad bar) I had to float it instead of absolutely positioning 
> it. Items like: warning, important, note and codetables had 
> to change the way the title is done from a div to a span to 
> keep the background color from stretching across the page and 
> overlapping the ads. The bottom part of them is now a <p> 
> instead of a div for the same reason. The header will now 
> only have a colored background directly under the text 
> instead of a banner that goes across the page. Other than 
> that it still looks the same.
> 
> Look for this in the next few days: I'm going to be making a 
> change to the way the menu works (not the way it looks, only 
> the HTML that renders it). The change will make it degrade 
> more gracefully with larger fonts or in small windows. As 
> usual IE is giving me lots of headaches or I would already 
> have it done.
> 
> Thanks for bringing this up neysx. You are right, if I am 
> going to focus on accessibility I need to apply it everywhere 
> and not selectivly.
> 
> It's all coming together now thanks to the excellent 
> feedback. Keep it coming people! :-)
> 
> -Curtis
> --
> www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 
> 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Wednesday 14 December 2005 11:58, Aaron Shi wrote:
> There are only a few occasions that warrant margin minimization, e.g.
> printing borderless photos on paper.  The standard rule of thumb for
> text on screen is 0.5 inches (apparent).  At least line up the left
> edge of the content text with the Gentoo logo.  If you do, you'll
> notice that the Gentoo logo is lined up with the text and lined up with
> the credit logo at the bottom (the way it's intended).  From there,
> logic dictates that whatever margin's on the left should be mirrored on
> the right (unless you're Picasso).  Margin on top and bottom should be
> at least as large as the ones on the side.  As for the adbar, all I can
> say is, you fit the furniture into the house, not the house onto the
> furniture.  Ads are secondary or way down the list, why are we
> compromising the main objectives of the site over sub-sub-sub items?
>
> Turning margins back on would be a good idea...  ;)

I agree with you here. Looking at the first sentence of 
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml#doc_chap3
The recommmended maximum words per line (around 10 to 12) is about 
doubled. Besides the reading having become harder, the absense of the 
margins also makes the pages look full.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Curtis Napier]

Aaron Shi wrote: lots of stuff about text browsers.


Sorry, I should have been more specific in my last email (as usual).

The text browser support is still on my list, I haven't forgotten it. 
Since we basically decided to wait to implement this until after the new 
year I thought it would be best to get my list of stuff that I was going 
to do after it went live done now.

I stripped out a lot of the text stuff to make the code easier for me to 
work with and once we get a layout that is acceptable I'll work the text 
stuff back in and make sure the normal stuff degrades for a text browser 
in an acceptable manner.

Don't worry Aaron, all the thought you put into it is not lost, only set 
aside temporarily.
-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Aaron Shi]

Ok that's good to know, by the way, 

> I was planning on making the green arrows have a "> OR <" in 
> the alt tag so it should still look good on a text browser. 
> Is that acceptable?
> 
> I may end up using text-only anyway. I still have to play 
> with it and see what looks best. If you *want* me to only use 
> text then let me know, not a problem.

the alt tag trick would work great in this case.

Aaron
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curtis Napier [mailto:curtis119@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 7:17 AM
> To: www-redesign@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org
> 
> Aaron Shi wrote: lots of stuff about text browsers.
> 
> 
> Sorry, I should have been more specific in my last email (as usual).
> 
> The text browser support is still on my list, I haven't forgotten it. 
> Since we basically decided to wait to implement this until 
> after the new year I thought it would be best to get my list 
> of stuff that I was going to do after it went live done now.
> 
> I stripped out a lot of the text stuff to make the code 
> easier for me to work with and once we get a layout that is 
> acceptable I'll work the text stuff back in and make sure the 
> normal stuff degrades for a text browser in an acceptable manner.
> 
> Don't worry Aaron, all the thought you put into it is not 
> lost, only set aside temporarily.
> --
> www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 
> 

-- 
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Xavier Neys]

Curtis Napier wrote:
>  >>> Xavier Neys wrote:
>  >>>
>  >>>> Links to GWN RSS feeds are not properly displayed:
>  >>>> http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>  >>>> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml
>  >>>
>  >>> I forgot to copy over the image. fixed.
>  >>
>  >> The xml image is underlined and it's darn ugly IMHO.
>  >
>  > It's even worse on printable pages:
>  > http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml?style=printable
> 
> Is it OK now?

The "xml" image is still underlined.
The printable page looks much better.

>> I prefer a list of links to older news just like on the current site, 
>> but obviously not crammed in the left margin anymore.
>> I you choose the "more news" approach, fair enough, but why use an 
>> extra /main/en/morenews.xml file with an extra ID that has to be 
>> defined in the DTD even though those IDs are not use anymore and extra 
>> logic in the xsl?
>> All you need is a "?newsitemcount=20" link.
> 
> I went with the newsitemcount solution. Why didn't I think of that? Oh 
> well, it's fixed now.

Not sure asking for 1000 news items is reasonable and the same link to 
?newsitemcount=1000 appears on that page too.

>> 2nd & 3rd level title look better.
>> I can't say as much of the top titles :(
> 
> How are the titles now?

Top title is still missing.
The big fat "4. Preparing the Disks" has disappeared.
It was there: http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/wwwredesign/5.png

It hasn't been fixed on printable pages.
Speaking of printable pages, none of them have any title.

Weird thing: clicking on a screenshot on 
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/main/en/shots.xml adds a vertical scroll bar to it.

> I made a major change to the content area. I did this to address the 
> problem of "Dead Space" under the ad bar that several people have 
> complained about and to help make the site degrade properly when fonts 
> are increased or the window is small.

Looking at it, I think it would look better if the ad column ran to the end of 
the page. Sorry for suggesting to either colour it or use it. The former is 
better IMHO.


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

Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Blackace]

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On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:12 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> I'm still working on the handbook menu, anybody have any ideas? I'm 
> going to try the green arrows somehow or other unless someone can come 
> up with something better.

I would suggest this is a good opportunity to figure out how the sub-nav
for specific sites like the forums and bugzilla will work out in
addition to sub-nav for the handbook and other handbook.xsl documents
(the dev handbook comes to mind)...my first suggestion along those lines
would be to place a sub-navigation bar under the main navigation but
above the ad bar, in other words where the five promo boxes are on the
main page, just collapsed in terms of height...this would also allow you
to keep the search interface around on other pages of the site...and you
could add a combo box to it for selecting what search to perform...this
and a unified interface on all gentoo sites with unified search result
pages will allow people to move from one site to the next, finding what
they need, quickly, efficiently, and intuitively.

> I made a major change to the content area. I did this to address the 
> problem of "Dead Space" under the ad bar that several people have 
> complained about and to help make the site degrade properly when fonts 
> are increased or the window is small.
> 
> Doing this caused a problem with block items overlapping the ads. This 
> is because in order to get text to wrap under it (ad bar) I had to float 
> it instead of absolutely positioning it. Items like: warning, important, 
> note and codetables had to change the way the title is done from a div 
> to a span to keep the background color from stretching across the page 
> and overlapping the ads. The bottom part of them is now a <p> instead of 
> a div for the same reason. The header will now only have a colored 
> background directly under the text instead of a banner that goes across 
> the page. Other than that it still looks the same.

I see the effects of this in the ad bar's padding, width, and in the
line-height of it's contents (which may just be noticeable relative to
the horizontal problems), and in how the main page scrolls horizontally
now.

I don't know if it's related or not, but the jump pads at the bottom now
have a large gap between the top image of each one and it's contents.

Another small thing that catches my eye is the title rows for the
newsitems, it needs some padding so the background color isn't crowding
the text...and it might look better if the date to the left of the title
had a background color, maybe a slightly different color, so the whole
newsitem is better defined from the others in place of the horizontal
rules that were removed (which don't get me wrong, looked worse, but the
newsitems are lacking definition now).

Another thing on the newsitems that comes to mind is how the author on
the left is exactly one row higher than the text on the right...I agree
there needs to be top-padding in the text row, but it seems it would be
ok for the text and the author to line up and share the same
top-padding.

> It's all coming together now thanks to the excellent feedback. Keep it 
> coming people! :-)

Gladly, thank you for continuing on with the hard/real work of this
thing :)

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer

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RE: [www-redesign] Current status

[Aaron Shi]

> > + ToDo: code html/css in a way that works.
> > This is how http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ looks at the moment:
> > http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/new.png
> > FYI, the current design:
> > http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/cur.png (1)
> 
> I know of this problem, but I wasn't expecting anyone to 
> browse with such large fonts!  
> 
> The problem occurs under 2 conditions:
> 1) a browser using the Gecko engine
> 3) user-defined font size increase overrides browser default 
> by 2 levels or more
> 
> These 2 conditions have to occur simultaneously to cause the 
> problem.  
> 
> For a font size increase of exactly 2 levels, the 3rd 
> condition is that the browser width has to be less than 965px.
> 
> This is the reason why I implemented a font size switcher on 
> the article pages: 
> http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/generic.html
> 
> Users can increase the article text size, without using a 
> crude browser based rule that leaves everything blown out of 
> proportion.
> 
> However...
> 
> There are 3 possible solutions to this:
> 
> 1) Decrease the number of nav items (i.e. to 4 or 5) so when 
> window is narrow they won't wrap over.
> 2) Specify a very small default size so when people increase 
> the font size it won't grow too big...however a majority of 
> people leave the browser font size on default and to them it 
> would appear small if we specify a small size.
> 3) Redo the layout.  The page is currently horizontally 
> fluid, I'm sure we can make things like the nav bar and 
> header vertically fluid as well.
> 
> The first 2 solutions are not too feasible.  Solution 3 will 
> be quite complicated which is why I didn't do it in the first 
> place.  Since it has come to my attention that this issue 
> might be affecting more people than I previously estimated, I 
> better get started on it right away.

As I soon discovered, solution 3 isn't quite feasible either.  However, I
managed to make some adjustments and although it doesn't look as good as the
normal index (slight changes, can you spot them?), bigger user fonts will
work.  The layout is generally ok up to the font that Xavier had in his
screenshot (2 levels higher than browser default).  I don't see much point
in supporting 3 or higher levels above browser default font size.  At those
sizes they should just switch to the bare bones text version and blow it up
all they want.  Most web pages don't even look like web pages at that point.

Big font safe layout:
http://aaronshi.com/gentoo/fonttest.html

If anyone has better ideas/methods regarding large fonts and layout, please
give it a shot.  I think the best idea is to not tweak the design for
browser-specific user defined font size increases, but rather supply the
font sizes via alternate style sheets and cookies (like how the font size
changer on http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/generic.html works).  This way, we
have control over what fonts are increased, etc.  


> Glad to hear someone is working on the xsl. Once you have 
> something and Aaron has some CSS for me to use, i'll start 
> working on the scripts.gentoo.org design. All I can say is 
> that it's going to be a fun job getting the layout looking right...

No kidding, after I implemented the above adjustments in Firefox it took
another hour to get it working in IE.  Then another 30 mins for Opera...the
only way to make the nav work in Opera after the adjustments was to float
everything to the right.  Weird as hell.

I think we should thoroughly test everything out in different browsers
before we use the CSS as a base to start on other things.  Some work arounds
will require a lot of work and we certainly don't want to be knee deep when
we realize it.


> One problem I've noticed with this design is that we loose 
> our quick links in the footer like on forums.g.o, could we 
> fit them in there somewhere?

Hence the 2 tiered CSS system.  Forums.gentoo.org can have that feature
implemented in its own sitewide CSS in addition to the basic look and feel
provided by the global CSS. ;)

Regards,
Aaron

--
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

[www-redesign] Current status

[Sven Vermeulen]

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Okay, it's quite difficult to keep this one alive, but I'll try anyhow :)

Aaron, you told me that the design put online at
http://www.siphos.be/~svermeulen/gentoo/index.html was quite different from
what you had in design. Is this still the case? If so, I'll need the
"better" design to be put in CVS.

We hardly have anything except this front-page design and that's not much,
although many can be distilled from it.

As you might notice at
http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/roadmap.xml#layout we (I) still
need some designs for other reference pages. Really, this is designing. I'm
not good at it. I'd be *very* grateful if people take a stab at it.

My proposal for the structure used by the Gentoo website is online at
http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/structure.txt, comments are
appreciated. You might want to take a look at other distributions and
community-driven projects to get an idea on how you'd like the website to
evolve.

We might also want to start looking at our XML DTDs, see if we can improve
the current XML formats, explain why certain tags are obsoleted and what
tags aren't, etc. This is the first step to the XSLT.

But mainly, we need those reference pages. Anyone with some knowledge of
layouting pages - go for it!

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Documentation & PR project leader

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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Re: [www-redesign] Current status

[Sven Vermeulen]

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On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 08:42:06PM +0100, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
[...]

Oops, forgot to include something a bit more interesting. I've tar'ed up the
current stuff we have (not much) and put it online at
http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/redesign-www-20050307.tar.gz.

Wkr,
      Sven Vermeulen

-- 
  Documentation & PR project leader

  The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

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RE: [www-redesign] Current status

[Aaron Shi]

The design is similar, but there are problems present in the one at
http://www.siphos.be/~svermeulen/gentoo/index.html that was never present in
the one located at http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/  I have no idea how that
could occur other than if the html and css files/versions got mixed up
somehow.  I will mail you the right files in a bit as soon I get started on
the new reference designs on the roadmap.  Now that we have a roadmap, I'll
get started on those pages right away.

Can anyone with Safari or other exotic browsers hit print preview on
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/generic.html and tell me if it looks the same
as in Firefox (which I'll be using as the reference browser)?  Printing uses
the print css which we could also use as a basis for the printable reference
page.  What do everyone think about color in print pages?  I.e. should I
leave the colors in print pages or make it all black and white (what you see
in the print preview right now is essentially black and white)?

-Aaron


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sven Vermeulen [mailto:swift@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 11:42 AM
> To: www-redesign@robin.gentoo.org
> Subject: [www-redesign] Current status
> 
> Okay, it's quite difficult to keep this one alive, but I'll 
> try anyhow :)
> 
> Aaron, you told me that the design put online at 
> http://www.siphos.be/~svermeulen/gentoo/index.html was quite 
> different from what you had in design. Is this still the 
> case? If so, I'll need the "better" design to be put in CVS.
> 
> We hardly have anything except this front-page design and 
> that's not much, although many can be distilled from it.
> 
> As you might notice at
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/roadmap.xml#layout 
> we (I) still need some designs for other reference pages. 
> Really, this is designing. I'm not good at it. I'd be *very* 
> grateful if people take a stab at it.
> 
> My proposal for the structure used by the Gentoo website is 
> online at 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/structure.txt, 
> comments are appreciated. You might want to take a look at 
> other distributions and community-driven projects to get an 
> idea on how you'd like the website to evolve.
> 
> We might also want to start looking at our XML DTDs, see if 
> we can improve the current XML formats, explain why certain 
> tags are obsoleted and what tags aren't, etc. This is the 
> first step to the XSLT.
> 
> But mainly, we need those reference pages. Anyone with some 
> knowledge of layouting pages - go for it!
> 
> Wkr,
>       Sven Vermeulen
> 
> --
>   Documentation & PR project leader
> 
>   The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>
> 

--
www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [www-redesign] Current status

[Xavier Neys]

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Hi all,

My 2% of your currency:

+ Artwork origin is still unknown. As long as we don't know for sure we are
allowed to use it, we won't expose ourselves to legal action.

+ General note: html pages should make as little use of <img> as possible and
let the css add images whenever possible.
FYI, I just replaced line.gif(1) from the current pages with a border
attribute because it writes more bytes to the logs than it sends down the
wire. At 40,000+ hits/day on line.gif alone, it's a waste easily avoided.

+ ToDo: complete design, i.e. decide on how to display note/warn/impo
elements, code samples, tables, credits, handbook navigation...

+ ToDo: code html/css in a way that works.
This is how http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ looks at the moment:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/new.png
FYI, the current design:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/cur.png (1)

+ ToDo: cleanup and coding of guide.xsl will be rather trivial once the above
has been completed. I have already made it a bit shorter(1) by factoring the
right-hand column that was coded twice and removed the <table> used to layout
newsitems.


(1) some changes are still waiting to be committed.


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

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RE: [www-redesign] Current status

[Aaron Shi]

> + Artwork origin is still unknown. As long as we don't know 
> for sure we 
> + are
> allowed to use it, we won't expose ourselves to legal action.

The following images have no usage restrictions.

http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=207618

http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=182475

http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=141927

http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=77962 

http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=147870

The following image has no usage restrictions provided that the author is
contacted (which I just did, waiting for reply).

http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=176068

There are two images unaccounted for, the background for Interact and the
image for Resources.  I can no longer find them in the database (might've
got lost when their database pruned etc.).  People with similar problems
have posted on their forums that one should seek the admin's help.  I have
contacted the admin to track down the original authors.  If the admin cannot
locate the original authors/permission info, I will find suitable
replacements.

All other graphics, icons, etc. are made by me.


> + General note: html pages should make as little use of <img> as 
> + possible and
> let the css add images whenever possible.

That is also my goal, the prototype already uses CSS to place most of the
images, but it can be further improved.


> + ToDo: complete design, i.e. decide on how to display note/warn/impo
> elements, code samples, tables, credits, handbook navigation...

I'm on it.


> + ToDo: code html/css in a way that works.
> This is how http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ looks at the moment:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/new.png
> FYI, the current design:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/cur.png (1)

I know of this problem, but I wasn't expecting anyone to browse with such
large fonts!  

The problem occurs under 2 conditions:
1) a browser using the Gecko engine
3) user-defined font size increase overrides browser default by 2 levels or
more

These 2 conditions have to occur simultaneously to cause the problem.  

For a font size increase of exactly 2 levels, the 3rd condition is that the
browser width has to be less than 965px.

This is the reason why I implemented a font size switcher on the article
pages: 
http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/generic.html

Users can increase the article text size, without using a crude browser
based rule that leaves everything blown out of proportion.

However...

There are 3 possible solutions to this:

1) Decrease the number of nav items (i.e. to 4 or 5) so when window is
narrow they won't wrap over.
2) Specify a very small default size so when people increase the font size
it won't grow too big...however a majority of people leave the browser font
size on default and to them it would appear small if we specify a small
size.
3) Redo the layout.  The page is currently horizontally fluid, I'm sure we
can make things like the nav bar and header vertically fluid as well.

The first 2 solutions are not too feasible.  Solution 3 will be quite
complicated which is why I didn't do it in the first place.  Since it has
come to my attention that this issue might be affecting more people than I
previously estimated, I better get started on it right away.

Regards,
Aaron



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Xavier Neys [mailto:neysx@gentoo.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 3:41 AM
> To: www-redesign@robin.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [www-redesign] Current status
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> My 2% of your currency:
> 
> + Artwork origin is still unknown. As long as we don't know 
> for sure we 
> + are
> allowed to use it, we won't expose ourselves to legal action.
> 
> + General note: html pages should make as little use of <img> as 
> + possible and
> let the css add images whenever possible.
> FYI, I just replaced line.gif(1) from the current pages with 
> a border attribute because it writes more bytes to the logs 
> than it sends down the wire. At 40,000+ hits/day on line.gif 
> alone, it's a waste easily avoided.
> 
> + ToDo: complete design, i.e. decide on how to display note/warn/impo
> elements, code samples, tables, credits, handbook navigation...
> 
> + ToDo: code html/css in a way that works.
> This is how http://www.aaronshi.com/gentoo/ looks at the moment:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/new.png
> FYI, the current design:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/images/cur.png (1)
> 
> + ToDo: cleanup and coding of guide.xsl will be rather 
> trivial once the 
> + above
> has been completed. I have already made it a bit shorter(1) 
> by factoring the right-hand column that was coded twice and 
> removed the <table> used to layout newsitems.
> 
> 
> (1) some changes are still waiting to be committed.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> --
> /  Xavier Neys
> \_ Gentoo Documentation Project
> /  French & Internationalisation Lead
> \  http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
> /\
> 

--
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Re: [www-redesign] Current status

[Michael Curtis Napier]

I'm working on the xsl at the moment. I'm trying to recycle the
existing guide.xsl but much of it will have to be changed to fit the
new layout. I have the main index.xml working if anyone wants to look
at it. The style sheet needs to be tweeked a little though.

http://curtis119.no-ip.org

Some of the other pages work but the formatting isn't fixed. About, Get
Gentoo and Social Contract(I added this to the jumppad). I'll be
working on this all week and I'll give an update as it comes together.


I have the handbook working a little but it's on a different virtual
server. I'll try to integrate it into the main one by the end of this
week so everyone can look (It's not very nice to look at at the
moment).


Aaron, are you planning on making this cascading stylesheet with multi
.css files permanent? I think it would be easier if we consolidate it
into one style sheet. Making a seperate style sheet for things like
"about" and "socialcontract" and "docs" and "news" would make things to
complicated when we could have one single css file that controlled
every page. A seperate one for "print" may be OK though. Thoughts
anyone?


--- Sven Vermeulen <swift@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Okay, it's quite difficult to keep this one alive, but I'll try
> anyhow :)
> 
> Aaron, you told me that the design put online at
> http://www.siphos.be/~svermeulen/gentoo/index.html was quite
> different from
> what you had in design. Is this still the case? If so, I'll need the
> "better" design to be put in CVS.
> 
> We hardly have anything except this front-page design and that's not
> much,
> although many can be distilled from it.
> 
> As you might notice at
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/roadmap.xml#layout we (I)
> still
> need some designs for other reference pages. Really, this is
> designing. I'm
> not good at it. I'd be *very* grateful if people take a stab at it.
> 
> My proposal for the structure used by the Gentoo website is online at
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/structure.txt, comments are
> appreciated. You might want to take a look at other distributions and
> community-driven projects to get an idea on how you'd like the
> website to
> evolve.
> 
> We might also want to start looking at our XML DTDs, see if we can
> improve
> the current XML formats, explain why certain tags are obsoleted and
> what
> tags aren't, etc. This is the first step to the XSLT.
> 
> But mainly, we need those reference pages. Anyone with some knowledge
> of
> layouting pages - go for it!
> 
> Wkr,
>       Sven Vermeulen
> 
> -- 
>   Documentation & PR project leader
> 
>   The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>
> 

> ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature 


--
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RE: [www-redesign] Current status

[Aaron Shi]

I'm using multiple style sheets to take advantage of the cascading
properties of CSS.  There won't be a separate style sheet for each section,
that would defeat the purpose of CSS.  ;)  What I have in mind is a global
css for all Gentoo sites (if I recall, we were going to implement this
design on bugs/packages.gentoo.org  etc.).  Then a sitewide style sheet for
each gentoo site (i.e. one for www.gentoo.org, one for bugs.gentoo.org, one
for forums.gentoo.org...) if necessary.  So as far as screen CSS goes, each
page would have two that completes the presentation: the global one for all
sites and the sitewide one for the current site.  The basic look and feel
would be consistent throughout all the sites, but I'm sure each site would
have individual needs that would be better addressed via a sitewide style
sheet.  Right now there are a few lines of CSS links within a page, but
eventually (if we don't care about old browsers like NS 4.x) we can use a
"loader" style sheet and use @import to load all the CSS into one CSS file,
and just have that one file on a page.

I contemplated about having one giant style sheet, but with more than one
site using the CSS we would have, for each site, a CSS file with partly
identical CSS and partly specific CSS...all in one file.  What we'd have is
multiple such files for all the sites.  Eventually when small adjustments
are made here and there (i.e. site level adjustments), the CSS files which
are supposed to do exactly the same thing one some levels and specific
things on other levels will become inconsistent.  Also, if we have sitewide
requirements that need to override global rules, then with the 2 tiered CSS
it would be clear where to find the rules (global or sitewide file), but
with the all-in-one scenario the above confusion can happen easily.

Picture this: you need to make an override to a global rule.  Since each
site has its all-in-one CSS, rather than making an overriding rule below the
global rule, you could alternatively just edit the global rule in the file
and it would achieve the ends.  Then suppose another person comes along and
is making a new network site, he'll take the all-in-one CSS from the first
site, copy the global rules for the new style sheet and then adjust the
specifics for the new site.  However, the supposedly global rule was
modified by a previous person, so what he just copied over will be
inconsistent with the actual global rules.  If this happens elsewhere, what
we'd end up with a bunch of inconsistencies.  I'm sure mechanisms (i.e. the
CVS) are in places to prevent this from happening, but with the 2 tiered
system it would effectively make it impossible for this kind of problem to
occur.

Or, if we have all the the CSS for all the sites in one file, then we would
be wasting a lot of bandwidth transmitting unnecessary information. 


To recap the 2 tiered system idea:

- "Global" controls the basics of all sites within the Gentoo network (i.e.
the layout and basic look and feel of www/bugs/forums/packages/etc., to
maintain a basic appearance consistency)

- "Sitewide" controls all pages within a specific site (I'm sure the site
level CSS requirements will be quite different for bugs compared to forums,
so each of these sites will have a sitewide file that governs all the pages
within its domain)


The cascading I have in mind goes like this:

- Global screen (tier 1)
- Sitewide screen (tier 2)

- Global print (tier 1)
- Sitewide print (tier 2)

- Font size variation rules for article pages (tier 3, though I wouldn't
really consider this a tier)


Using a loader:

- Loader

- Font size variation rules for article pages

Insider the loader:

We @import the all the necessary global and sitewide screen/print files.


Hopefully this clear things up a bit.  I wish I could talk in person and
draw pictures and things. ;D

-Aaron



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Curtis Napier [mailto:curtis119@yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:36 PM
> To: www-redesign@robin.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [www-redesign] Current status
> 
> I'm working on the xsl at the moment. I'm trying to recycle 
> the existing guide.xsl but much of it will have to be changed 
> to fit the new layout. I have the main index.xml working if 
> anyone wants to look at it. The style sheet needs to be 
> tweeked a little though.
> 
> http://curtis119.no-ip.org
> 
> Some of the other pages work but the formatting isn't fixed. 
> About, Get Gentoo and Social Contract(I added this to the 
> jumppad). I'll be working on this all week and I'll give an 
> update as it comes together.
> 
> 
> I have the handbook working a little but it's on a different 
> virtual server. I'll try to integrate it into the main one by 
> the end of this week so everyone can look (It's not very nice 
> to look at at the moment).
> 
> 
> Aaron, are you planning on making this cascading stylesheet 
> with multi .css files permanent? I think it would be easier 
> if we consolidate it into one style sheet. Making a seperate 
> style sheet for things like "about" and "socialcontract" and 
> "docs" and "news" would make things to complicated when we 
> could have one single css file that controlled every page. A 
> seperate one for "print" may be OK though. Thoughts anyone?
> 
> 
> --- Sven Vermeulen <swift@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > Okay, it's quite difficult to keep this one alive, but I'll 
> try anyhow 
> > :)
> > 
> > Aaron, you told me that the design put online at 
> > http://www.siphos.be/~svermeulen/gentoo/index.html was 
> quite different 
> > from what you had in design. Is this still the case? If so, 
> I'll need 
> > the "better" design to be put in CVS.
> > 
> > We hardly have anything except this front-page design and 
> that's not 
> > much, although many can be distilled from it.
> > 
> > As you might notice at
> > http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/roadmap.xml#layout we (I) 
> > still need some designs for other reference pages. Really, this is 
> > designing. I'm not good at it. I'd be *very* grateful if 
> people take a 
> > stab at it.
> > 
> > My proposal for the structure used by the Gentoo website is 
> online at 
> > http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/www-redesign/structure.txt, 
> comments are 
> > appreciated. You might want to take a look at other 
> distributions and 
> > community-driven projects to get an idea on how you'd like 
> the website 
> > to evolve.
> > 
> > We might also want to start looking at our XML DTDs, see if we can 
> > improve the current XML formats, explain why certain tags are 
> > obsoleted and what tags aren't, etc. This is the first step to the 
> > XSLT.
> > 
> > But mainly, we need those reference pages. Anyone with some 
> knowledge 
> > of layouting pages - go for it!
> > 
> > Wkr,
> >       Sven Vermeulen
> > 
> > -- 
> >   Documentation & PR project leader
> > 
> >   The Gentoo Project   <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>
> > 
> 
> > ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature
> 
> 
> --
> www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 
> 

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Re: [www-redesign] Current status

[Ian Leitch]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Michael Curtis Napier wrote:
| I'm working on the xsl at the moment. I'm trying to recycle the
| existing guide.xsl but much of it will have to be changed to fit the
| new layout. I have the main index.xml working if anyone wants to look
| at it. The style sheet needs to be tweeked a little though.
|
| http://curtis119.no-ip.org
|
| Some of the other pages work but the formatting isn't fixed. About, Get
| Gentoo and Social Contract(I added this to the jumppad). I'll be
| working on this all week and I'll give an update as it comes together.
|
|
| I have the handbook working a little but it's on a different virtual
| server. I'll try to integrate it into the main one by the end of this
| week so everyone can look (It's not very nice to look at at the
| moment).
|
|
| Aaron, are you planning on making this cascading stylesheet with multi
| .css files permanent? I think it would be easier if we consolidate it
| into one style sheet. Making a seperate style sheet for things like
| "about" and "socialcontract" and "docs" and "news" would make things to
| complicated when we could have one single css file that controlled
| every page. A seperate one for "print" may be OK though. Thoughts
| anyone?

Glad to hear someone is working on the xsl. Once you have something and
Aaron has some CSS for me to use, i'll start working on the
scripts.gentoo.org design. All I can say is that it's going to be a fun
job getting the layout looking right...

One problem I've noticed with this design is that we loose our quick
links in the footer like on forums.g.o, could we fit them in there
somewhere?

Regards,
Ian Leitch
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