Re: [Savannah-hackers] html/css hackers: input requested [gnu.org #13755]

[Lalo Martins]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 08:36:13PM +0000, Jaime E. Villate wrote:
> 
> 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.

A refactoring of the menu would be good, but that is beyond what is under my
control.  The condition rms had for this project is "change just the layout
and leave the content".  That is why I didn't move the "why we exist", etc
links to the left menu either.

>   - Move the menu from the left to the right.

Visually, I hate it on the right.  Besides it is an unwritten standard to
have it on the left - see savannah, the directory, and others.  When there
are three columns, the right column is for "acessories", as in Slashdot with
their "slashboxes".

The advantage of following these usage patterns is that people will be
already used to them; a link bar on the left already falls into a sort of
"blind spot" in the sense that you automatically realize it is a menu and
not part of the content.

>     There are some advantages: text-browser users will get the text first
>     and then the menu rather than the other way around;

Only if I was using tables, which is not the case.  Actually another hard
condition rms had or the project is that it must look acceptable on
text-browsers.  I went to a great length out of my way in that aspect; I
suggest you try it with lynx, links and w3m.  It looks almost identical to
the current homepage.

>     when printed it looks better and if the right does not fit in the page,
>     you have better chances of getting readable text.

Here you have a point.  But I don't think print is an important requirement.

> 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.

This is what I'm thinking about as the second stage of the project.  I
already have some technical ideas of how to do that (hint: you just imported
it into subversions), but I'll leave that discussion for after stage 1 ends
:-)

[]s,
                                               |alo
                                               +----
--
            Those who trade freedom for security
               lose both and deserve neither.
--
http://www.laranja.org/                mailto:address@hidden
         pgp key: http://www.laranja.org/pessoal/pgp

Eu jogo RPG! (I play RPG)         http://www.eujogorpg.com.br/
GNU: never give up freedom                 http://www.gnu.org/