Re: [Usability] The future of gup in developer and bugzilla

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 12:10 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On 24 Jan 2006, at 18:43, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 18:31 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 18:44 +0100, Quim Gil wrote:
> >>>
> >>> En/na Calum Benson ha escrit:
> >
> >> Hmm yes, true enough.  Have to admit I'd personally be quite happy to
> >> move away from DocBook (perhaps just to plain old HTML) for the HIG
> >> anyway, as it's kind of hard to take stylistic advice very seriously
> >> from a document that looks a bit crap :)  But of course, we lose the
> >> ability to easily generate PDFs from plain HTML.  (I have similar
> >> reservations about using anything vaguely wiki based for such large
> >> documents-- I've yet to see any done well.)
> >
> > It's only crap output because the XSLT you're using produces
> > crap output.  There's nothing inherent about DocBook that makes
> > the output crap.
> 
> Agreed, but I haven't seen anything I'd consider notably better from  
> anyone else using the same technology, which makes me think there's  
> more than a trivial amount of work involved to significantly improve  
> the output.  Of course, I'd be very happy to be wrong :)

The default output of gnome-doc-utils is, I think, better than
the output of those other stylesheets.  It's not the fanciest
stuff in the world, but it follows a consistent scale.  I'm not
particularly happy with some stuff, like admonitions and contents
listings.

Best-case, though, there's only so pretty you can make generalized
output.  Most of the really nice stuff you'd do to make pages look
slick involves adhering to some style.  I could make output look
like the Gnome web pages, but then people who aren't building the
Gnome web site would find my stuff useless.

If you wrote the HIG in HTML, you would absolutely do a bunch of
fancy CSS to make it look nice.  Do you know what you get when you
write HTML without CSS or any other style stuff?  You get crap.
It looks horrible.

So somebody whip up a mockup of what you think the the pages should
look like.  If it can be done in HTML, then I guarantee I can get
the generated HTML from gnome-doc-utils to do it.  Then we'll roll
what we can back in and help everybody, including Yelp users.

So, any good web designers want to take a stab at prettifying our
DocBook transformations?

--
Shaun