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Posted to dev@avalon.apache.org by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org> on 2004/05/27 21:07:52 UTC

New Avalon site Look in the making.

Everyone,

I have been hard at work to implement the new site look proposed by Stephen a 
week or so ago.

I preview can now be found at; http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/index.html

Please report any noticed rendering problems for your browser, and include a 
screenshot. Since mailing lists may filter your attachment, I hope everyone 
can add it to Jira in the "Central" module;
	http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL

Important!! Don't forget to indicate Browser, Browser Version and OS.

There are still a couple of known issues I want to clarify;

1.  Images and other resources are not copied, so they won't show up, or show 
up as broken links. I hope to fix this tomorrow, if I have time.

2. Too many "Overview" in the menus. Some of these are to be removed. But it 
is easier to see what needs to be removed than to notice what needs to be 
added, in this case. No need to report this.

3. Font sizes seems to be a problem, but please take screenshot and post to 
Jira, for comparisons. I wouldn't mind if screenshots of "Ok" situations are 
added as well. This Task should be used for screenshots; 
http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1

Cheers and thanks for your help.

Niclas
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 03:29, Berin Loritsch wrote:

> All in all, the overall theme looks fairly pleasing.  

Good...

> To be honest, I
> have mixed feelings about the Sir Arthur C Clark quote.  

I think we will need to debate it. Stephen loves it, I think it shouldn't be 
so central, and you have "been burnt by magic" (you should be a good boy...)

Anyway, it is a first cut, and hardly difficult to change.

Niclas

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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Niclas Hedhman wrote:

> Everyone,
> 
> I have been hard at work to implement the new site look proposed by Stephen a 
> week or so ago.
> 
> I preview can now be found at; http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/index.html
> 
> Please report any noticed rendering problems for your browser, and include a 
> screenshot. Since mailing lists may filter your attachment, I hope everyone 
> can add it to Jira in the "Central" module;
> 	http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL
> 
> Important!! Don't forget to indicate Browser, Browser Version and OS.
> 
> There are still a couple of known issues I want to clarify;

All in all, the overall theme looks fairly pleasing.  To be honest, I 
have mixed feelings about the Sir Arthur C Clark quote.  I used to love
it, but I have been burned by "magic" several times.  To me it invokes
painful memories of black boxes that you thought did one thing end up
doing everything except what you really wanted.  Other than that it
looks good.

-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 04:45, Berin Loritsch wrote:
> Niclas Hedhman wrote:

> >>http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/excalibur.htm
> >>Notice the unseemly large text?
> Ok, I am using Firefox 0.8 (Mozilla with browser separated).

Located the problem. It is in the source docs.
<section><title>  instead of <section name="">

Cheers
Niclas
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Berin Loritsch wrote:

> Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> 
>> On Friday 28 May 2004 04:08, Berin Loritsch wrote:
>>
>>> Another type of formatting issue:
>>>
>>> http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/excalibur.html 
>>>
>>>
>>> Notice the unseemly large text?
>>
>>
>>
>> No I don't... Looks perfectly fine here.
>>
>> Please use http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1 for 
>> screenshots.
>> (Don't forget system specs.)
> 
> 
> Ok, I am using Firefox 0.8 (Mozilla with browser separated).
> 
> The unseemly large text starts at about halfway down.  Here is a 
> snapshot from my browser (I just made the image indexed color).

Grumble.  Apparently I cannot paste in the snapshot in the Jira
repo, but it is also stripped out via the mail....

-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Berin Loritsch wrote:

> Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> 
>> On Friday 28 May 2004 04:08, Berin Loritsch wrote:
>>
>>> Another type of formatting issue:
>>>
>>> http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/excalibur.html 
>>>
>>>
>>> Notice the unseemly large text?
>>
>>
>>
>> No I don't... Looks perfectly fine here.
>>
>> Please use http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1 for 
>> screenshots.
>> (Don't forget system specs.)
> 
> 
> Ok, I am using Firefox 0.8 (Mozilla with browser separated).
> 
> The unseemly large text starts at about halfway down.  Here is a 
> snapshot from my browser (I just made the image indexed color).

I added it as an attachment.

-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Niclas Hedhman wrote:

> On Friday 28 May 2004 04:08, Berin Loritsch wrote:
> 
>>Another type of formatting issue:
>>
>>http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/excalibur.html
>>
>>Notice the unseemly large text?
> 
> 
> No I don't... Looks perfectly fine here.
> 
> Please use http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1 for screenshots.
> (Don't forget system specs.)

Ok, I am using Firefox 0.8 (Mozilla with browser separated).

The unseemly large text starts at about halfway down.  Here is a 
snapshot from my browser (I just made the image indexed color).



-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 04:08, Berin Loritsch wrote:
> Another type of formatting issue:
>
> http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/excalibur.html
>
> Notice the unseemly large text?

No I don't... Looks perfectly fine here.

Please use http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1 for screenshots.
(Don't forget system specs.)

> Also, I know this is the old excalibur related text, but how much of it
> can be brought forward?  IOW, use the same outline to get started, but
> change the details (like declaring the lifestyle through meta info
> instead of implementing an interface).

Actually, DWA has mistakenly been brought to the central/users/ area. There is 
another copy in central/legacy, which eventually is going to be 'upgraded' 
some more. I spent a lot of time on that previously, but more work is needed 
to get it up-to-date with modern practices.


Cheers
Niclas

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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Another type of formatting issue:

http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/excalibur.html

Notice the unseemly large text?

Also, I know this is the old excalibur related text, but how much of it 
can be brought forward?  IOW, use the same outline to get started, but 
change the details (like declaring the lifestyle through meta info 
instead of implementing an interface).

-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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Download.cgi (was Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.)

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Niclas Hedhman wrote:

> 
> P.S.  As for the Download, you won't find it. It doesn't exist. I haven't 
> looked into the download.html+download.cgi to see how it is hanging together. 
> It just struck me as very odd that there were an HTML file in there at all.


The CGI script reads and interprets the .html file.  The .html file is
then expanded (the macros are interpreted and replaced with the
mirroring info).  So, the HTML file provides the overall content and
look and feel while the CGI file is the one actually called.

It works kind of like this:

User browses http://avalon.apache.org/downloads.cgi which invokes the
script.  The script looks for downloads.html and interprets it.

If you can generate the HTML with the macros embedded correctly, then
there is no real problem.  Otherwise this is one of those things where
you have to edit it by hand.


-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 20:13, Leo Simons wrote:

> sorry about that. Hope you can put it to productive use in some way :-D

A lot more positive pieces in this round :o)  Thanks for that.


> > I disagree. If you are only making incremental chagnes to something
> > 'better", you will either not be able to reach a goal, or have something
> > much worse on the way. i.e. If you are on a local maximum, you can't
> > reach an ultimate maximum with reduction of your achieved altitude.
> >
> :-D. Now you're speaking my language...

> The fact that this is not possible indicates we do not have orthogonal
> concerns at all! What is the relationships between these concerns?

To start with, you have in the 'current site' a navigation.xml that requires 
everything 'navigatable' to be present in each such file. I.e. you need to 
modify a dozen or so files if you move a single document. For directories it 
varies from a dozen places to worst case scenario of hundreds of changes. 
This alone is an unbearable situation, which has been resolved (the 
navigation.xml now only contain the 'local' content, and navigation is 
aggregated by the xslt/build system.

So, reorganizing without changing the look is bound for disaster and enormous 
amount of work down the drain.
Fixing the navigation.xml under Maven+Jelly is not something I even want to 
try, after so much headaches with Maven earlier.
Finally, creating a copy of the existing look just for the sake of making 
smaller steps, knowing it will be thrown away in N days/weeks, is also not 
very motivating.
Hence, navigation + look sits in the same generator and was done in one step. 
Content organization was mainly left out for later.

> and here's our disagreement :-D
>
> You start with making something useful, then you make it pretty. 

We don't have "something useful". What we have is 'useless' due to the 
navigation.xml. :o(

> I thought you were looking for feedback in
> general, which turned out to not be entirely true. 

I hope I can spur some more people to help out more actively in the content 
organization, both in proposal of structures but also go in and do some 
gritty dirty SVN work.


Cheers
Niclas

P.S.  As for the Download, you won't find it. It doesn't exist. I haven't 
looked into the download.html+download.cgi to see how it is hanging together. 
It just struck me as very odd that there were an HTML file in there at all.


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Leo Simons <ls...@jicarilla.org>.
Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> A lot of negativism here ...  :o)

sorry about that. Hope you can put it to productive use in some way :-D

>>Safari on OS X 10.3.4 (or so, whatever the latest version is):
>>* horizontal scrollbar (on a 1024x768 screen) on all pages
>>   (apparently caused by the right-aligned menu)
> 
> I have almost concluded it is almost impossible to be pixel perfect on every 
> browser, for instance it looks extremely bad on non-CSS (1 or2?)  compatible 
> browsers.

indeed. This has little to do with pixel-perfection though. I'll bet ya 
that the scrollbar is still there on a 2000x10000 pixel screen. I really 
really hate horizontal scrollbars.

> I think it is still a lot better than for instance the Cocoon, Gump and other 
> Forrest generated sites, which produce pixel sensitive sites (for instance 
> shows up crap on my system).

agreed.

However, safari is pretty much css-compatible. I suspect you are mixing 
CSS-P and CSS 2 positioning composition models or something like that, 
and this causes some problems. In this case, probably a margin which you 
assume is collapsed because of a float:right but that isn't actually the 
case across browsers...or something like that.

>>* text inside tables is HUGE, for example in the table inside
>>     central/legacy/index.html
>>   the fonts look like 14pt or 15pts
> 
> That is why I have the http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1.
> The point size is 12pt (nothing to do with pixels), which should show in your 
> screen as 'normal reading size', i.e. what most books are printed in.
> Unfortunately, it seems there are many systems out there that ends up 
> un-calibrated by the Browser  +  OS + DIsplay driver + Monitor physical size, 
> and that fact has accelerated the detoriation of the 'point system', and some 
> new inofficial "standard" is emerging.

somehow I doubt apple has problems with that, as the GUI is all 
PDF-based and they cater to a lot of designers :-D

briefly looking at the CSS, I think you need to change the line

	body {

to

	body, td {

there's a lot of browsers out there (including NS4 and IE4, IIRC), which 
attach some "default CSS" to several elements, including TABLE and TD. 
This is because the transition from HTML 4.0 to XHTML 1.1 Strict+CSS was 
not fully specified, and everyone had to make up some rules of their 
own. In this case, most CSS formatting elements are cleared as you enter 
a TD element. I think W3C does have a page on that now.

> IMHO, this is a very sad development, and I don't know how to deal with it.

most big sites deal with it by having a test farm and just trying stuff 
out. You get better with experience. The ASF is likely to have a virtual 
farm (using vmware) within a few months, btw.

 > I now feel we are back to "Rule of Thumb" and we
> are measuring against the thumb of Bill Gates & Co.

well, actually, if you put IE6 in "strict" mode (by using xhtml 1.1 
strict IIRC), it is by far the most standards-conformant browser out there.

> I don't see this as a problem. How big change is 'allowed'.

there's no guidelines there. Use your own judgement. Think about what 
you want to do and if you're accomplishing it. A "rule of thumb" in UI 
design is that you should do what users expect. And that does mean 
following bill gates & co.

> Is it all about moving the menu to the right? 

it is about size, ordering, location, availability and behaviour of UI 
elements, the website structure, etc.

> That is not a "Look" issue (see Subject line). You are now into 'organization 
> of content', which is a different concern (SoC).

yep.

>>You're doing a radical rewrite of everything here, at the same time.
> 
> I disagree. If you are only making incremental chagnes to something 'better", 
> you will either not be able to reach a goal, or have something much worse on 
> the way. i.e. If you are on a local maximum, you can't reach an ultimate 
> maximum with reduction of your achieved altitude.

:-D. Now you're speaking my language...if we have orthogonal concerns 
here you should be able to radically change along only one axis of the 
concern space, achieve your global maximum there, without changing 
anything on the other axes.

The fact that this is not possible indicates we do not have orthogonal 
concerns at all! What is the relationships between these concerns?

>>Start with just changing the
>>look of the current site (not the menu items or navigational structure),
>>iron out the bugs and "release", incorporate feedback and "release",
>>set up the first bit of the new structure "central" or "portal" or
>>"planet" or whatever idea you have here and "release". 
> 
> Isn't this what I am doing?

from my end of the net it doesn't look that way. Perceptions, perceptions...

> I am producing a new look. But since the navigation of the look has some 
> important pieces they are need in there from the beginning. The existing 
> content has been brought into that look 'as-is', site->central, various 
> product materials -> products and stuff that are not at all up to date -> 
> central/legacy.
> 
> Doing that, is what you say should be done, and few paragraphs higher up, you 
> are heavily criticizing "content organization" (which have barely changed 
> beyond the 'central', 'products', 'planet'  leader).
> Sorry, but the criticism is not at all consistent.

hmm. Could very well be. But when I look at the site it seems as if 
"everything" has moved. This is definately not an objective observation 
(I haven't measured movement of anything), but it doesn't have to be. 
The subjective feedback is probably more important for you than the 
objective feedback (since you can figure out and analyze the raw data by 
yourself).

The perception could be because the menu moved, or because the colors 
changed, or because stuff actually moved. I still can't find the 
download link, so its probably a little of both.

> What happened to your hippie/revolutionary culture?

soaked it in various alcoholic drinks.

>>maybe you want to talk to a web usability person and sit next to him as
>>he runs through the site.
> 
> That is mostly 'content organization' and somewhat a later concern.

and here's our disagreement :-D

You start with making something useful, then you make it pretty. The 
pretty stuff you pour in is poured in to make the useful stuff easier 
and more fun to use.

Making something less useful for the sake of aesthetics is "not done" in 
my take on web design ;)

anyways, wrapping up, I thought you were looking for feedback in 
general, which turned out to not be entirely true. So disregard most of 
my comments (or save them for later) and continue your revolution ;)

cheers,

- LSD


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
A lot of negativism here ...  :o)


On Friday 28 May 2004 18:09, Leo Simons wrote:
> Safari on OS X 10.3.4 (or so, whatever the latest version is):
> * horizontal scrollbar (on a 1024x768 screen) on all pages
>    (apparently caused by the right-aligned menu)

I have almost concluded it is almost impossible to be pixel perfect on every 
browser, for instance it looks extremely bad on non-CSS (1 or2?)  compatible 
browsers.
I think it is still a lot better than for instance the Cocoon, Gump and other 
Forrest generated sites, which produce pixel sensitive sites (for instance 
shows up crap on my system).

> * text inside tables is HUGE, for example in the table inside
>      central/legacy/index.html
>    the fonts look like 14pt or 15pts

That is why I have the http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1.
The point size is 12pt (nothing to do with pixels), which should show in your 
screen as 'normal reading size', i.e. what most books are printed in.
Unfortunately, it seems there are many systems out there that ends up 
un-calibrated by the Browser  +  OS + DIsplay driver + Monitor physical size, 
and that fact has accelerated the detoriation of the 'point system', and some 
new inofficial "standard" is emerging.

<rant>
IMHO, this is a very sad development, and I don't know how to deal with it. 
Some Browser+OS+Driver combo produces better results than others. Should one 
try to satisfy the masses with the bad systems or produce the correct ones? I 
happen to believe in standards. Starting with the abandonment of "Rule of 
Thumb", all the way through metric, DIN and ISO standards, our society 
wouldn't exist without it. I now feel we are back to "Rule of Thumb" and we 
are measuring against the thumb of Bill Gates & Co.
</rant>

> * no link back to www.apache.org

This is being addressed. I am putting in a faded feather in the top bar, which 
I think looks neat and follows the theme.

> * __too__ different from the rest of the ASF websites. The menu is on
>    the right, the front page is empty, there is half a dozen terms that
>    are not explained but highly foreign (ie "laboratory", "central", ...)

I don't see this as a problem. How big change is 'allowed'. jakarta follows 
the ASF look, xml.a.o doesn't, Cocoon/Forrest has their variants and Maven 
some more. Is it all about moving the menu to the right? 

> * number of clicks/minutes required to find the download of
>    avalon-framework (still haven't found it...)
> * complete breakage of "backward compatibility" (everything has moved,
>    old URLs no longer work, etc etc)...where's my API docs??

That is not a "Look" issue (see Subject line). You are now into 'organization 
of content', which is a different concern (SoC).


<snip content="more content organization issues" />

> answers to questions like these should be on the front page, or hooked
> from the front page. 

But to meet your argumentation in "content organization"; I agree.

> You're doing a radical rewrite of everything here, at the same time.

I disagree. If you are only making incremental chagnes to something 'better", 
you will either not be able to reach a goal, or have something much worse on 
the way. i.e. If you are on a local maximum, you can't reach an ultimate 
maximum with reduction of your achieved altitude.

> Start with just changing the
> look of the current site (not the menu items or navigational structure),
> iron out the bugs and "release", incorporate feedback and "release",
> set up the first bit of the new structure "central" or "portal" or
> "planet" or whatever idea you have here and "release". 

Isn't this what I am doing?
I am producing a new look. But since the navigation of the look has some 
important pieces they are need in there from the beginning. The existing 
content has been brought into that look 'as-is', site->central, various 
product materials -> products and stuff that are not at all up to date -> 
central/legacy.

Doing that, is what you say should be done, and few paragraphs higher up, you 
are heavily criticizing "content organization" (which have barely changed 
beyond the 'central', 'products', 'planet'  leader).
Sorry, but the criticism is not at all consistent.

> In summary:
> * breaks "backward compatibility".

Necessary. The old site is extremely disorganized.

> * too different from what people expect.
> * many steps back from a "ussability" and "navigatability" POV.
> * incremental changes, not radical ones, not just for software.
> * think of the main "user stories" for your website and make sure those
>    are supported, and supported well.

What happened to your hippie/revolutionary culture?
Change is painful for the rulers, and can be liberating for the subjects, and 
often necessary to radically break out from stale norm.
Example; We are changing the traffic from driving on one side of the road to 
the other. Incremental principle, let start with cars first, do truncks 
later, or we take it one junction at a time and work our way through all.
Silly example? Well, it is a real world example of that intermediary solutions 
may not be acceptable. I think we have that here as well, although less 
dramatic.

> maybe you want to talk to a web usability person and sit next to him as
> he runs through the site.

That is mostly 'content organization' and somewhat a later concern.

As for menus on the right or left, and its role in 'usability', I have read 
numerous reports that menus _should_ be on the right, but since most menus 
are placed on the left, users have developed a bad habit of thinking that is 
better. _I_ have no strong opinion about it, and was in fact planning a small 
javascript that pushed the menu to either side, by user choice.

You are also welcome to participate in the content organization side of 
things. Except for the central, products, planet concepts, nothing much else 
is in finalization stages.


Cheers
Niclas

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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Leo Simons <l....@student.utwente.nl>.
Safari on OS X 10.3.4 (or so, whatever the latest version is):

* horizontal scrollbar (on a 1024x768 screen) on all pages
   (apparently caused by the right-aligned menu)
* text inside tables is HUGE, for example in the table inside
     central/legacy/index.html
   the fonts look like 14pt or 15pts


Non-tech issues:

* no link back to www.apache.org
* __too__ different from the rest of the ASF websites. The menu is on
   the right, the front page is empty, there is half a dozen terms that
   are not explained but highly foreign (ie "laboratory", "central", ...)
* number of clicks/minutes required to find the download of
   avalon-framework (still haven't found it...)
* complete breakage of "backward compatibility" (everything has moved,
   old URLs no longer work, etc etc)...where's my API docs??
* ...
* ...
* ...

I appreciate the goal of a more "corporate feel" (disagree with it as I 
may :D), but at the moment you're also sacrificing navigation, 
usability, familiarity and compatibility. I can't find anything. If I 
were a new user (say a james or tomcat user, your average jakarta 
leech), I certainly would feel very confused after 5 mins on the avalon 
site. When I go to a software website, I don't even want to think about 
questions like this:


* who wrote this stuff?
* what does it do?
* how can I run a demo?
* what language is it written in?
* what's the "target audience" (am I the target audience)?
* where do I get the latest release?
* where do I get the latest head revision (from cvs or svn)?
* where do I ask questions?
* ...
* ...

answers to questions like these should be on the front page, or hooked 
from the front page. Rich Bowen had a nice rant or two about it on his 
weblog. In some cases you can get away with "mailing lists" instead of 
"get support" because many people know they can get support on the 
mailing list.

You're doing a radical rewrite of everything here, at the same time. 
Just like with software, the best way to improve websites, 
documentation, etc, is an incremental one. Start with just changing the 
look of the current site (not the menu items or navigational structure), 
  iron out the bugs and "release", incorporate feedback and "release", 
set up the first bit of the new structure "central" or "portal" or 
"planet" or whatever idea you have here and "release". Etc etc. 
Incremental development.

In summary:

* breaks "backward compatibility".
* too different from what people expect.
* many steps back from a "ussability" and "navigatability" POV.
* incremental changes, not radical ones, not just for software.
* think of the main "user stories" for your website and make sure those
   are supported, and supported well.

maybe you want to talk to a web usability person and sit next to him as 
he runs through the site.

cheers,

- LSD


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 03:52, Berin Loritsch wrote:

> The site is rendered incorrectly:
>
>        <p>Â </p>

I know that the HTML doc contains the UTF-8 character, but that shouldn't be a 
problem. It becomes a problem when Mozilla (for some reason) is deciding that 
the document is in ISO-8859-1 format instead of the UTF-8 which is in the 
<?xml?> prelude.

> As you can see, the &nbsp; is not in the document, but rendered
> incorrectly in a resolved format.
> You might have to embed it as &amp;nbsp; so after rendering you get
> the desired '&nbsp;' that you want.

I will change to <br/> instead.

Niclas
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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
Niclas Hedhman wrote:

> On Friday 28 May 2004 03:16, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> 
>>On Friday 28 May 2004 03:07, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
>>
>>>I preview can now be found at;
>>>http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/index.html
>>
>>I just noticed that the last build I made, has a broken first page...
> 
> 
> Fixed. Copied the build to the wrong place.
> 
> Still one problem though.
> 
> The HTML documents are encoded as HTML, and for Mozilla this is fine when 
> reading from the local file system, but when browsing from the server, it 
> reports that the Document is in ISO-8859-1, and hence the &nbsp; is not 
> rendered correctly.
> 
> Does anyone know anything about this?

The site is rendered incorrectly:

       <p>Â </p>

       <p class="caption">
         <em><strong>"any sufficiently advanced technology is
         indistinguishable from magic"</strong></em><br/>
         Sir Arthur C Clarke
       </p>
       <p>Â </p>

As you can see, the &nbsp; is not in the document, but rendered
incorrectly in a resolved format.

You might have to embed it as &amp;nbsp; so after rendering you get
the desired '&nbsp;' that you want.

-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 03:16, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> On Friday 28 May 2004 03:07, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> > I preview can now be found at;
> > http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/index.html
>
> I just noticed that the last build I made, has a broken first page...

Fixed. Copied the build to the wrong place.

Still one problem though.

The HTML documents are encoded as HTML, and for Mozilla this is fine when 
reading from the local file system, but when browsing from the server, it 
reports that the Document is in ISO-8859-1, and hence the &nbsp; is not 
rendered correctly.

Does anyone know anything about this?


Niclas
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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
+------//-------------------+


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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 03:07, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> I preview can now be found at;
> http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/index.html

I just noticed that the last build I made, has a broken first page...

:o(

Niclas

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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 03:07, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> Everyone,
>
> I have been hard at work to implement the new site look proposed by Stephen
> a week or so ago.
>
> I preview can now be found at;
> http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/index.html

> 1.  Images and other resources are not copied, so they won't show up, or
> show up as broken links. I hope to fix this tomorrow, if I have time.

This has now been fixed, and all (not that many) images should be showing.

> 2. Too many "Overview" in the menus. Some of these are to be removed. But
> it is easier to see what needs to be removed than to notice what needs to
> be added, in this case. No need to report this.

Stephen has been rmoving them at a steady pace. I haven't checked the exact 
status here.

> 3. Font sizes seems to be a problem, but please take screenshot and post to
> Jira, for comparisons. I wouldn't mind if screenshots of "Ok" situations
> are added as well. This Task should be used for screenshots;
> http://nagoya.apache.org/jira/browse/CENTRAL-1

Quite a lot of effort has gone into figuring out the best font-size strategy. 
I and Stephen think(!) that style.css now is reasonable on most platforms, 
i.e. tested on Mozilla (Windows+Linux), IE6 (Windows) and Konqueror (Linux 
KDE) and on these the result is very similar.

Furthermore, site generation is several times faster than with the existing 
Maven solution. On my system a fresh generate take just less than one minute 
and a re-generate (files in filesystem cache) ~35seconds.

And site loading is fairly effective as well.

The Theme has been 'de-branded' and the 'brand' is settable through 
properties/parameters, for re-use in other projects/products.


Any and all comments on Look is welcome. Some 'core' Avaloners have expressed 
concern over the Look's deviation from its history, and the 'norm' at ASF in 
general. Others have expressed support for this 'commercial' or 'corporate' 
look.
What does the users think of this seemingly controversial path??  Should we 
keep the 'traditional' look or forge ahead with the 'commercial' look?


Content Organization has just commenced, with the goal of increased usability.


Cheers
Niclas
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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Friday 28 May 2004 04:05, Berin Loritsch wrote:
> I noticed some more formatting errors:
>
> http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/introduction.ht
>ml
>
> Notice one of the paragraphs unnaturally set off to the left, and an
> empty box that tells me something should be there but isn't.

Ok this is a good one.

I have not assumed that paragraphs can reside outside sections, and that is 
what is happening here (click on the XML icon at bottom to receive source).

Does anyone know of a DTD or some spec on how these documents are supposed to 
be formatted?


Cheers
Niclas
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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
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Re: New Avalon site Look in the making.

Posted by Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>.
I noticed some more formatting errors:

http://www.apache.org/~niclas/docs/central/users/developing/introduction.html

Notice one of the paragraphs unnaturally set off to the left, and an 
empty box that tells me something should be there but isn't.

-- 

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to 
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to 
produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
                 - Rich Cook


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