Re: WANTED: Design for documentation

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Hi Patrick,

Am Dienstag, 22. Juli 2008 schrieb Patrick McCarty:
> > (Please note that due to some CSS issues I'm working on, this does not
> > yet properly work in Internet Explorer...)
>
> I managed to improve the CSS issues with IE (and general CSS issues),
> but I had change the structure of the page.  Unfortunately, I don't
> know Perl (for the texi2html), or else I would send you a patch with
> my improvements.

No problem, I know our init script quite well, so those small changes are 
simply done by me.

> Here is a summary of what I changed (I also made little comments in
> index.html; search for *PM* in the file):
>
> ** I moved the "tocframe" div to the top of the body

Hmm, I put the tocframe at the bottom on purpose, because otherwise browsers 
with CSS turned off (or browsers that don't support absolute positioning) 
will print the whole TOC before the contents and the user has to scroll 
wayyyy down to get to the real contents of the page. Try it out in 
firefox: "View" -> "Page Style" -> "No Style" will turn off CSS support and 
format the html without the css. Also, I suppose that screen readers and 
similar devices will probably be fooled by a long list at the top of the 
page. In particular, for blind users reading the docs will be even harder if 
every page starts with dozens of irrelevant TOC entries...

One of the credos of good CSS design is that the page should also look okay 
with CSS turned off, so I'd prefer a solution where the TOC can be placed 
after the contents in the HTML file. On the other hand, the other (and even 
more important) idea of good CSS design is that the page should look with CSS 
turned on. It seems that IE doesn't allow both, so I suppose I'll just have 
to bite the grape and move the TOC before the contents :(

> ** I wrapped the rest of the body in a "main" div

Hehe, I already had this in, bit didn't get it to work with the TOC after the 
body, so I removed it again.

> ** I applied the appropriate CSS, and made modifications for some IE7
> quirks
>
> The strange issue I'm having with IE7 is the double vertical
> scrollbars that are created.  But it doesn't seem to cause any
> problems.  I've tested Firefox 2 and 3 and Safari on Mac OS X, as well
> as Firefox 2 and 3 and IE7 on Windows XP.

I'm testing with Konqueror 3.5, Firefox 3 in Linux, opera and IE 6/7 (running 
under wine in Linux).

Cheers,
Reinhold

- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/
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