Re: The current disscusion is good, but...

[Matt McClanahan <cardinal dodds net>]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Steve Fox wrote:

> Joakim Ziegler wrote:
>
> >   * What are the requirements on the navigational structure and page
> >     design/layout? This includes both usability, aestetical and browser
> >     compatibility issues.
> 
> I think most people want to support a wide variety of browsers. In all
> honesty this practically eliminates the useage of CSS since the most
> popular browsers are quite broken with regards to this. I'm especially
> thinking of the fact that turning off Javascript in Netscape mistakenly
> turns on CSS as well. A year from now when Mozilla is more popular maybe
> we could reconsider it then? If we decide to use CSS we need to be very
> careful to make sure the site still looks decent with CSS support turned
> off.

One option could be to design the site such that content and presentation
are seperated, allowing more than one interface to the website's content.
The downside is it would increase the scope of the project somewhat,
potentially harming maintainability.

> >   * Policies for content creation tools. This wouldn't be important in most
> >     projects, but it is in this case. Basically, there should be a policy on
> >     what goes into the site, when it comes to licensing, etc. For instance,
> >     the current www.gnome.org site uses Adobe Garamond Condensed for menus,
> >     which is a commercially licensed font. I've used my licensed copy of this
> >     font to create the images, but people still reacted to this. In
> >     retrospect, I think this was a bad decision on my part. On the other
> >     hand, I think it should be acceptable for people to use tools of their
> >     choice to create graphics, etc. (So I won't be prevented from using my
> >     favourite graphics tools, which happen to be proprietary).
> 
> I'd strongly recommend not using text images...especially if they
> require commercial fonts. The main reason for this being i18n. It would
> be a pain to keep having to match images exactly with all the various
> languages. I also recommend we do not use GIF files but rather PNG. I
> don't think it matters what tools are used to create them, but staying
> away from formats with nasty copyrights is a good idea. I'd like to see
> some coding standards as well. Even if I don't like the way that's
> chosen I think it'd be nice to have some consistency. We don't need to
> be nazis about it, but at least try to keep things clean.

Last I heard, PNG transparency support isn't what it should be in IE or
Netscape 4.. Anyone know off the top of their heads how extensive PNG
support is in these two browsers?  I'm assuming support in Konqueror,
Mozilla, etc. is complete.

Matt