I'm back.

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

Hey guys. I'm back.

Basically, I have a bit more time now, and I'd like to get into the
GNOME web project again. I'm definitely not saying "I'm back as the
project leader", although if you guys want me to assume that role again,
I'm open to the idea.

But basically, I just want to get back into the project, provide
whatever I can. I'm probably a bit out of touch these days, though, so
you'll have to forgive me for making a fool of myself while I get back
up to speed.

Backend stuff is a very natural thing for me to work on, but seeing as
Jeff is doing a (very nice sounding) XML/XSLT-based system for this
that's not quite done yet, it's probably better if I focus on
HTML/CSS/Design issues for now. I've been reading a bit of the debates
here lately, and I have a few thoughts.

* Regarding server-side browser detection: This is simple to do (if
noone else wants to code it, I can, it's trivial). However, I just went
and looked at some user-agent stats on www.gnome.org, and there are a
few things that stand out:

Total number of hits yesterday: 1'612'859

Total number of hits from browsers known to handle CSS1/CSS2 in a sane
way: 

Mozilla/5: 845'834
MSIE 5.0:  167'264 (this is pushing the boundary of "sane CSS", but it's
close enough)
MSIE 5.5:  149'064
MSIE 6:    252'491

Total:   1'414'653

Hits from user-agents that don't care (wget, lynx, links): 4'369

Which leaves us with a total of 193'837 hits, or pretty close to 12% of
the hits that *might* care that the page won't display completely
correctly in their browser. Now, consider that most of these are likely
to be Netscape 4.x or similar, which has CSS support so broken it's fair
to consider it non-existent, and what it all means is that having
different stylesheets selected based on browser detection won't do much
good; what's needed is a table-based layout that's known to work on NS4,
which we can fall back to. I think it's a mistake to assume that this
has to look exactly the same as the CSS version, it'll only serve to
cripple both versions. CSS is definitely the way to go, as that 12% will
probably diminish rather rapidly over the coming 6 months or so, and at
some point, those people will just have to accept that all pages they
view degrade to completely readable, but not extremely pretty, HTML.

So in view of all this, I think it would be wise to use browser
detection to choose between two layouts, one that uses CSS1/2, and is
tested on IE5 and up (with a focus on IE 5.5 and up), and Mozilla, and
one that's tables-based and simpler, and works in HTML 3.2 browsers.


* About design: I see Steve Hall's templates are still based on the
mockups I made back in the day. This is flattering. :)

They've been prettified a bit since then, though, I like the subtle
footstep background and the highlighting, although I'm less certain
about the use of icons in the sidebar. They're cute, but they don't seem
to add much value, and the folder/document metaphor is pretty broken for
a website, because a category usually has both a top-level index page,
and subpages, unlike a folder, which doesn't have any information
itself, just sub-contents. Also, the implication that you're actually
*writing* to the page that's currently active is pretty broken.

The icons also take up a bit of horizontal space which I think could be
better used for text, so that sidebar menu items break as infrequently
as possible.

Another thing I noticed is that when the menu item text does wrap, it
doesn't retain the indentation, which makes the whole thing a lot more
confusing than it has to be. Surely, this is fixable in the stylesheet?

The mouseover highlighting of the GNOME logo seems unnecessary. It's
probably the biggest image on the page, and having two versions of it
seems like a waste. Also, "click on the logo in the top-left corner to
go to the front page" is such a common navigation device that I don't
think it needs explanation beyond the standard hand cursor.

"Welcome!" in the top nav bar is a little weird. I assume it goes to the
front page? If so, it should probably be called "Front Page" or "Main
Page", although we might consider dropping it completely, given the
common use of the logo as a front page link, as discussed above.
Dropping it will help with page width considerations.

It's tempting to think about some changes in the look itself. The
general division of the page works well, I think, as does the placement
of the GNOME foot logo, but the background images with scanlines seem a
little stark, it might be that a more subtle visual effect is desirable.
I can probably take a look at this. The GNOME foot definitely needs to
be worked on, the one in the templates is jaggy and ugly. I assume this
is a temporary image. In my mockups, I used a GNOME foot that was
slightly shaded in the color of whatever background image was used in
the top stripe, to pull the look a bit more together. This might be
worth doing, although it'll add a bit to the download time every time
you go to a new section. (At this point, as many times before, I wish
GNOME had a logo that was more graphic design-oriented, and not so
photorealistic and shaded. But well.)


There's probably more stuff too, but I want to get some feedback on my
thoughts. As mentioned above, I'm willing and ready to put work into
this, to the point of implementing it all myself if everyone things
these are good ideas, but decide they don't want to do any work. :)

-- 
 Joakim Ziegler - Ximian Engineer - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
FIX sysop - Free Software Coder - Writer - FIDEL & Conglomerate hacker
          http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/