Re: Potential improvements to the homepage?

[David Wright]

On Mon 22 Aug 2016 at 08:38:38 (+0200), David Kastrup wrote:
> Andrew Yoon <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > There are certainly many options to explore, many of them quite simple. At
> > any rate, over the next few days I'll take a crack at something and see
> > what people think. Should future discussions about this belong in the dev
> > mailing list? Apologies if this is the wrong place...
> 
> Well, yes and no.  The developer list is the right place to discuss
> implementation and extensions of LilyPond and "how to do $x".  This may
> lead to getting feedback from the user list, of course.
> 
> When we are talking about what amounts to changes in the CSS for mere
> appearances' sakes, the "how" question is pretty much already answered.
> We are not really talking about any extension of functionality (yet?).
> I'm not sure all developers read the user list, however.  But I also am
> not sure how many of those not reading the user list care about the
> appearance of the web page, either.
> 
> I haven't seen any proposals for _technical_ changes yet: those may well
> see a veto from developers for technical reasons.  As long as the main
> topic is the question of style (rather than concrete frame works and
> stuff), I don't see much potential for wasted work when an actual
> proposal (which needs to go through the developer resources anyway) is
> placed on the table only to get "oh, we can't do it in this way because
> of $SERVER, $FRAMEWORK, $ACCESSIBILITY, $SECURITY, $WEBSTANDARDS".

I, for one, am someone who depends on being able to magnify web pages
(Ctrl +, inverse Ctrl -) to cope with their font sizes. I was a little
surprised at lilypond.org's inability to scale up drastically
(surprised because the font sizes are good enough for me when the
third line of the introductory paragraph starts with "is free software").
Two more Ctrl + clicks and there's a collision; one more and the sidebar
starts falling off the page.

My desirables for home pages are plenty of logically grouped links,
no moving images, and the avoidance of buttons that have to be
dragged to make a selection (or which pop up a huge menu as you
move the mouse over them).

I think lilypond.org might be improved by making the "new features"
(2.16→2.18) link more visible; partnering it with a "forthcoming
features" (2.18→2.20) link because, let's face it, the community
here mainly discusses and encourages the development version; and
relegating the "thanks/brought to you by" section to an "About"
link in the top bar. If space on that bar is too valuable, "About"
could be added to the Introduction's second-row bar instead.

Cheers,
David.