Re: [Savannah-hackers] html/css hackers: input requested

[Jaime E. Villate]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 06:34:41PM -0200, Lalo Martins wrote:
> We're beta-staging a new layout for gnu.org at
> http://www.gnu.org/home.new.html - it's no revolutionary change, but IMO
> it's already much better, and a first step.  I would like to have the
> opinions of any savannah hackers who want to give them.

I see that after your initial message you have already followed Mathieu's
and Rudy's advice to make a new version and it now looks very nice.

I still suggest a couple of improvements to the menu:

  - Make it shorter. I think it has too many entries. If it could be
    simplified it would look less scary to newcomers who would already
    be amazed at the many language links.

  - Move the menu from the left to the right. There are some advantages:
    text-browser users will get the text first and then the menu rather than
    the other way around; when printed it looks better and if the right does
    not fit in the page, you have better chances of getting readable text. I
    think I already showed RMS some webpage with a large menu on the left; he
    did not like it because he said he had to move several screens down before
    getting the content. I could not understand him at first, but then I
    realized he was reading it with something such as lynx or links.

When you propose that new design for GNU.org, it would be crazy to go and
insert a menu in every page. Then you will go through a discussion similar to
the one we had for the www.fsfeurope.org pages: no server side includes or any
other form of dynamic content will be allowed because they want to have a site
that can be mirrored without any special settings at the mirror server.
The solution we decided to adopt was to use xhtml+xslt to generate static
pages. Some information such as copyright notice, disclaimers and language
links can be generated automatically by the XSLT page.
If you want to know more about that approach let me know.

Keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Jaime