On 12/23/2015 04:35 PM, wobbles wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 17:22:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Third I think I'm being reasonable if I ask to introduce new or custom
>> technology dependencies only with good reason.
>>
>>
>> Andrei
>
> I think that's very fair.
>
> On your earlier point of getting people to work on the website and also
> commit to helping out in future, is there an "official" thing here? Like
> a contract (An unpaid contract, obviously :D)?
>
> Or is it more a matter of trust from you and everyone else involved with
> the site towards a person stating they'd like to help?

There is no contract, only a matter of building a history of good contributions. -- Andrei

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 17:22:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Yah. Overall I think a redesign is needed simply because it's time. Second I think the particular redesign discussed here is nice in many ways. Third I think I'm being reasonable if I ask to introduce new or custom technology dependencies only with good reason.

That is very reasonable I too think but isn't it a question of viewpoint?
I see the dependency chain for a Website as follows:

1) HTML
2) HTML, CSS
3) HTML, CSS, Javascript

It seems that the dlang.org Homepage needs CSS and Javascript so 3 is the minimal dependency chain.
Ddoc is an additional dependency already and might be more efficient to insiders but to outsiders it is an obstacle.
I think you are right in saying that the site should be build with technologies you are most efficient with but you should also consider the obstacle you are building up by this.
It's hard to estimate the outcome of dropping ddoc but you might get more helpers by this move.

So I guess it's a question of how many contributers you get by removing ddoc which nobody is able to tell beforehand.
For this reason why not just try to go without it for now and decide later on if it is worth it or not.
I can't imagine that you loose that much efficiency by dropping ddoc for some time and I don't think it would be that much work to switch to ddoc later on.
But on the other hand I don't have a clue and might be totally wrong. :-)

By this decision you would also get a contributor who is willing to build the initial site which is propably the hardest thing to do.

On 12/24/2015 01:14 AM, Thomas Mader wrote:
> That is very reasonable I too think but isn't it a question of viewpoint?
> I see the dependency chain for a Website as follows:
>
> 1) HTML
> 2) HTML, CSS
> 3) HTML, CSS, Javascript
>
> It seems that the dlang.org Homepage needs CSS and Javascript so 3 is
> the minimal dependency chain.
> Ddoc is an additional dependency already and might be more efficient to
> insiders but to outsiders it is an obstacle.
> I think you are right in saying that the site should be build with
> technologies you are most efficient with but you should also consider
> the obstacle you are building up by this.
> It's hard to estimate the outcome of dropping ddoc but you might get
> more helpers by this move.
>
> So I guess it's a question of how many contributers you get by removing
> ddoc which nobody is able to tell beforehand.
> For this reason why not just try to go without it for now and decide
> later on if it is worth it or not.
> I can't imagine that you loose that much efficiency by dropping ddoc for
> some time and I don't think it would be that much work to switch to ddoc
> later on.
> But on the other hand I don't have a clue and might be totally wrong. :-)
>
> By this decision you would also get a contributor who is willing to
> build the initial site which is propably the hardest thing to do.

Currently dlang.org has over 62KLOC of Ddoc source, so any significant surgery on it will be a large effort. Dropping ddoc means we'd need to use another templating engine (getting back to raw html would be too much trouble), and 10 people have 11 ideas about which template engine is used by "everyone".

I can give you right now an estimate - dropping ddoc and replacing it with vibe.d is unlikely to be a landslide success. When the alternate documentation was introduced using vibe.d, my hope was that everybody would be all over it like a cheap white suit on rice, and that the use of vibe.d would organically grow to make the stdlib documentation stellar, and then engulf the main site. Sadly participation was scant, and we had a couple of vibe.d-related situations in which the maintainer division (ahem... Vladimir and myself) had no idea on what to do and had nobody to rely on.

Let me put that another way: for folks who want to improve dlang.org but for whom ddoc is an impediment, the option exists TODAY to work on large parts of the site that have nothing to do with it. Yet from what I can tell nobody is taking it. Would you have an interest? (Serious question.)


Thanks,

Andrei

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 06:43:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Currently dlang.org has over 62KLOC of Ddoc source, so any significant surgery on it will be a large effort. Dropping ddoc means we'd need to use another templating engine (getting back to raw html would be too much trouble), and 10 people have 11 ideas about which template engine is used by "everyone".
>
> I can give you right now an estimate - dropping ddoc and replacing it with vibe.d is unlikely to be a landslide success. When the alternate documentation was introduced using vibe.d, my hope was that everybody would be all over it like a cheap white suit on rice, and that the use of vibe.d would organically grow to make the stdlib documentation stellar, and then engulf the main site. Sadly participation was scant, and we had a couple of vibe.d-related situations in which the maintainer division (ahem... Vladimir and myself) had no idea on what to do and had nobody to rely on.

Thanks for those details your decision is much more clear now for me.
I didn't know that the documentation is switched to vibe.d already. So I guess everything comes down to the following question. Do you want to drop vibe.d or ddoc as a templating engine for the site?
Using both doesn't seem to make any sense and for me it's not clear which way you want to go.
I remember the decision being made that vibe.d should be more tightly integrated into D and if that is still true the question for the templating engine seems to already be settled.
If thats correct then allowing Jacob to do the work with vibe.d seems to bring you one step further to the goal to introduce vibe.d

> Let me put that another way: for folks who want to improve dlang.org but for whom ddoc is an impediment, the option exists TODAY to work on large parts of the site that have nothing to do with it. Yet from what I can tell nobody is taking it. Would you have an interest? (Serious question.)

At the moment my interest in Web Development is pretty low but I am interested to fix errors and add content as I see fit.
For that it's nice if the hurdle is as low as possible.
For me it probably doesn't make any difference if I need to use vibe.d or ddoc since I don't know them but I guess one of them is better suited for the task.

On 21.12.2015 14:58, anonymous wrote:
> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/
>
> On GitHub if people want to play around with it:
> https://github.com/aG0aep6G/dlang.org/tree/Ivan-Smirnov's-redesign
>
> That's a full clone of dlang.org in the new style. I just pasted it over
> the old style, and hacked around on top of it until it worked, more or
> less. It's a quick and dirty showcase. I touched everything, but
> polished nothing. There are more rough edges than smooth ones.

Since Andrei and Jacob are having creative differences, I figured I'd just go ahead with this my way, without changes to the tooling.

This is a more proper implementation of the redesign than what I showed before:


http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/

https://github.com/aG0aep6G/dlang.org/tree/Ivan-Smirnov's-redesign


It's far from done, and I don't know if I'm going to work more on it over the holidays. So next year maybe.

Todo/notes:

* Legalities

What's the legal status of this? Did Ivan Smirnov give his permission to use the visuals? If not, can we get it, do we need it?

* Reorganization of the menu

I reorganized the menu quite a bit. The layout simply doesn't allow for many top level items. I don't think it's for the worse.

* Logo

Using the current D logo for now.

* Medium width menu bar

Try making the browser narrower until the main menu bar has two lines of text. I don't like that solution, but switching to the layout with the menu button seems silly at that point. Suggestions welcome.

* Subnav on narrow screens

Example: http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/spec/intro.html

Can't have it as a side bar when the window is too narrow. Solution could be to have a link back to a dedicated TOC page instead. Suggestions welcome.

* "your code here" height

Many "your code here" snippets are too long. Cut them down, or change the layout to accommodate for them? I'd go with cutting them down. That may make the whole "your code here" idea pointless.

* Fonts

Do we go with Roboto Slab? What fallback fonts to use, and in what order? Candidates from the current dlang.org and from the mock-up are: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, Deja Vu, BitStream Vera Sans.

I didn't adopt the monospace font from the mock-up, because it looked pretty bad to me (rather wide, isn't it?). Plain 'monospace' is DejaVu Sans Mono on my system. That one looks better, imo.

* That blank space below "Documentation" on the home page

If anyone has an idea on how to stuff it, shoot.

* Forum and twitter widgets

Does anyone make use of these? I'd totally throw them out, but it may better to be conservative for now. Have to style them properly then.

* forum.dlang.org and visuald.dlang.org

... will have to be updated, too. I think this is a good opportunity to unify the menu situation.

* "Home" link?

Do we need a named Home link in the menu bar, or is the clickable logo enough? There is no other way to get to the home page.

* "your code here" link

Would be nice if the subject line could be prefilled with "[your code here]".

* Javascript fallbacks

Simply haven't done those, yet.

* Deletions that would maybe go under the radar

These things were beloved by some (i.e. Andrei), but in the redesign they are no more:

  * the Slogan
      The D Programming Language
      Modern convenience. Modeling power. Native efficiency.
  * justified text (can easily make a comeback)
  * the GitHub ribbon in the upper right corner on the download page

On 12/24/15 2:33 PM, anonymous wrote:
> This is a more proper implementation of the redesign than what I showed
> before:
>
>
> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/
>
> https://github.com/aG0aep6G/dlang.org/tree/Ivan-Smirnov's-redesign

I like it a lot! -- Andrei

On 12/24/15 8:26 AM, Thomas Mader wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 06:43:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Currently dlang.org has over 62KLOC of Ddoc source, so any significant
>> surgery on it will be a large effort. Dropping ddoc means we'd need to
>> use another templating engine (getting back to raw html would be too
>> much trouble), and 10 people have 11 ideas about which template engine
>> is used by "everyone".
>>
>> I can give you right now an estimate - dropping ddoc and replacing it
>> with vibe.d is unlikely to be a landslide success. When the alternate
>> documentation was introduced using vibe.d, my hope was that everybody
>> would be all over it like a cheap white suit on rice, and that the use
>> of vibe.d would organically grow to make the stdlib documentation
>> stellar, and then engulf the main site. Sadly participation was scant,
>> and we had a couple of vibe.d-related situations in which the
>> maintainer division (ahem... Vladimir and myself) had no idea on what
>> to do and had nobody to rely on.
>
> Thanks for those details your decision is much more clear now for me.
> I didn't know that the documentation is switched to vibe.d already. So I
> guess everything comes down to the following question. Do you want to
> drop vibe.d or ddoc as a templating engine for the site?
> Using both doesn't seem to make any sense and for me it's not clear
> which way you want to go.

At the top level we all want a nice site, not to use or avoid specific technologies. We also need a site that the maintenance team can maintain effectively. This is something that tends to be forgotten.

We now added some use of vibe.d because (a) there was a champion who did the work (thanks Sönke! Also I recall Martin worked on that a bit), (b) it has advantages over ddoc, (c) there was hope that others will pick up on it.

Things have not yet reached critical mass. Giving up on vibe.d right now sounds like quite a bad decision. We'd lose some nice documentation, but more importantly we'd compromise the idea of reform of dlang.org. Conversely, replacing ddoc with vibe.d is not only a one-time effort, but effectively a maintenance burden for which we don't have enough qualified people.

> I remember the decision being made that vibe.d should be more tightly
> integrated into D and if that is still true the question for the
> templating engine seems to already be settled.
> If thats correct then allowing Jacob to do the work with vibe.d seems to
> bring you one step further to the goal to introduce vibe.d

Again: vibe.d is being already used at dlang.org, yet it has seen little pickup. The key to making vibe.d successful on dlang.org is more folks fluent in vibe.d willing to help on a regular basis, not more drive-by work.


Andrei

On 24/12/15 20:33, anonymous wrote:
> On 21.12.2015 14:58, anonymous wrote:
>> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/
>>
>> On GitHub if people want to play around with it:
>> https://github.com/aG0aep6G/dlang.org/tree/Ivan-Smirnov's-redesign
>>
>> That's a full clone of dlang.org in the new style. I just pasted it over
>> the old style, and hacked around on top of it until it worked, more or
>> less. It's a quick and dirty showcase. I touched everything, but
>> polished nothing. There are more rough edges than smooth ones.
>
> Since Andrei and Jacob are having creative differences, I figured I'd
> just go ahead with this my way, without changes to the tooling.
>
> This is a more proper implementation of the redesign than what I showed
> before:
>
>
> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/

Most of the pages do not seem to be updated.

The drop down in the search fields looks very bad in Safari on OS X. I think this is a general problem with bootstrap. I remember having the same problem when I used bootstrap. In general I recommend using either Boostrap Select [1] or a Bootstrap drop down button [2]. For this particular case I recommend using either a field with a button with a drop down [3] or placing a magnifier icon to the left inside the search field and make a drop down menu out of that icon. The latter option is usually how native search fields look like and work on OS X.

[1] https://silviomoreto.github.io/bootstrap-select/examples/
[2] http://getbootstrap.com/components/#btn-dropdowns
[3] http://getbootstrap.com/components/#input-groups-buttons-dropdowns

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 25.12.2015 12:51, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Most of the pages do not seem to be updated.

I don't know what you mean. Could this be a cache thing? Can you give a specific example, maybe with a screenshot?

> The drop down in the search fields looks very bad in Safari on OS X. I
> think this is a general problem with bootstrap.

This version doesn't use Bootstrap anymore. I just changed some details from the current dlang.org, the core mechanism should work the same.

If the current dlang.org looks ok, but mine doesn't, then I must have messed up something. It looks fine for me, though, and I have no OS X around to check. Further assistance would be appreciated.

On Friday, 25 December 2015 at 14:04:36 UTC, anonymous wrote:
> On 25.12.2015 12:51, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> Most of the pages do not seem to be updated.
>
> I don't know what you mean. Could this be a cache thing? Can you give a specific example, maybe with a screenshot?
>
>> The drop down in the search fields looks very bad in Safari on OS X. I
>> think this is a general problem with bootstrap.
>
> This version doesn't use Bootstrap anymore. I just changed some details from the current dlang.org, the core mechanism should work the same.
>
> If the current dlang.org looks ok, but mine doesn't, then I must have messed up something. It looks fine for me, though, and I have no OS X around to check. Further assistance would be appreciated.

I'm away from my computer atm, so I'll just point you to www.browserstack.com. It's also free for open source projects. Test to your heart's content.