Minor issues, suggestions

[Konstantin Piroumian <kp...@apache.org>]

Hi!

I'm back again with my usual nitpicking.

Had a quick look at latest Forrest (produced by forrestbot) and noticed
several minor issues with menus, styles, etc.:

    - take a look at:
http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/sites/xml-forrest/community/howto/cvs-ssh/ho
wto-cvs-ssh.html - there is no menu and the page looks somewhat ugly
    - the selected tab has a wrong style (in default skin), probably that's
because the label is a link, but it wasn't before, so the link style is
applied. It used to be light blue and not underlined.
    - the font size now looks better, but the label under the printer image
is not readable (1152 x 864).

Now several suggestions in the light of new hierarchical site.xml structure:

If you take a look at the original design of the page
(http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-forrest/src/resources/layout/xml.apac
he.org/page.gif?rev=1.1.1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup)  then
you'd notice that the navigation bar at the top contains full path to the
document. If shouldn't be difficult to generate from site.xml.

Also there are Next [ 2] Prev links. These are also easy to generate from
the site.xml, isn't it?

Another thing that I suggested long time ago is to use JavaScript for
show/hide features in the menu bar. As the number of documents increases
you'll get a very long menu at the left. In such cases having possibility to
show/hide particular nodes would be very useful. It is easy to implement by
switching "display:none"/"display:block" styles on the <ul> elements.

Anyway, I am glad to see such a great progress on Forrest. Thanks!

--
  Konstantin

Re: Minor issues, suggestions

[Jeff Turner <je...@apache.org>]

On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 12:47:45PM +0300, Konstantin Piroumian wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm back again with my usual nitpicking.

As usual, useful and appreciated.

> Had a quick look at latest Forrest (produced by forrestbot) and noticed
> several minor issues with menus, styles, etc.:
> 
>     - take a look at:
> http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/sites/xml-forrest/community/howto/cvs-ssh/ho
> wto-cvs-ssh.html - there is no menu and the page looks somewhat ugly

The forrest site has a somewhat unusual layout, where the directory
structure doesn't follow the site.xml menu structure, resulting in
problems like this.  Easiest solution is just to define a book.xml in
that subdirectory, but it would be nice to come up with something more
durable.

>     - the selected tab has a wrong style (in default skin), probably that's
> because the label is a link, but it wasn't before, so the link style is
> applied. It used to be light blue and not underlined.

I think we should at least leave it underlined, otherwise who's to know
it is a link?

Perhaps we could have a mouse rollover change the background colour or
something.

>     - the font size now looks better, but the label under the printer image
> is not readable (1152 x 864).

Same here.  I'll do some poking this weekend.

> Now several suggestions in the light of new hierarchical site.xml structure:
> 
> If you take a look at the original design of the page
> (http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-forrest/src/resources/layout/xml.apac
> he.org/page.gif?rev=1.1.1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup)  then
> you'd notice that the navigation bar at the top contains full path to the
> document. If shouldn't be difficult to generate from site.xml.

Currently each path entry corresponds to a directory (done client-side
with js).  Looks like another job waiting for us to detach semantic
hierarchy with directory hierarchy.

> Also there are Next [ 2] Prev links. These are also easy to generate from
> the site.xml, isn't it?

Yes.  However it looks like Next and Prev are intended for when a large
doc is automatically split up.  IMO it doesn't really make sense out of a
single page context: what is the 'next' page, when pages are essentially
unordered?

> Another thing that I suggested long time ago is to use JavaScript for
> show/hide features in the menu bar. As the number of documents increases
> you'll get a very long menu at the left. In such cases having possibility to
> show/hide particular nodes would be very useful. It is easy to implement by
> switching "display:none"/"display:block" styles on the <ul> elements.

Would be neat.

--Jeff


> Anyway, I am glad to see such a great progress on Forrest. Thanks!
>