Re: New LilyPond website

[Carl Sorensen]

John,

I appreciate you bringing your expertise to LilyPond.

I'm really glad you have decided to work on trying to improve the CSS,
rather than moving the website to WordPress.  I would be strongly against
a move to any platform that would not have the website fully created by an
automated script that is part of our main git repository.  Having
effective automated tools is what allows LilyPond's website to be as good
as it is, because we have not had consistent web development effort
through time.

I prefer your new website to the old website. It looks cleaner and less
cluttered.  I think that is an improvement.  I hope you'll press forward
with cleaning up the look of our site and making it more responsive.

I am somewhat conflicted with serif vs. sans-serif.  For items that are
not associated with music, I have no problems with the sans-serif font.
But I feel that the Emmentaler music font goes much better with serif
fonts than with sans-serif fonts, so I find it a bit jarring when the
sans-serif font is closely integrated with music.

That said, I'm neither a graphic designer nor a typographer, so my opinion
may be somewhat unlearned.  But when I have looked for effective research
on serif vs. sans, I have never found any research that demonstrated
functional superiority for one over the other.  For example, see

http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-sans-serif-typef
aces/

As far as I can see, there is no empirical data that sans-serif typefaces
are better.  There is one widely-quoted but also widely-disparaged
empirical study (Wheildon) that showed serif was better for reading
comprehension.  Hence, there is no definitive proof that either serif or
sans-serif is better.  So it comes down to personal choice.

I don't feel strongly one way or another about the font choice.  But I do
feel strongly that we shouldn't use somebody's opinion as an authoritative
answer to the question.  It's just an opinion, unless there is some kind
of empirical evidence backing it up.

Thanks,

Carl