On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 14:22:24 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I don't share your opinion that the web site need to be "modern" to avoid warding off potential adopters. If they are turned off of using a system programming language by a bland (debatable) site look and feel, then I think there was really something else bothering them.

Case in point: http://gcc.gnu.org/

Am 19.04.2014 12:56, schrieb Aleksandar Ruzicic:
> Ok here's a mockup of search concept I would like to implement:
>
> http://krcko.net/dlang.org/dlang-search-concept.png
>
> Search suggestions feature would surely require JavaScript but IMHO it
> would be a really nice enhancement.
>
> Also, search suggestions would require existence of some search service
> on the server. I believe that without too much effort an indexer can be
> written that will feed data to ElasticSearch[1] which would be used by a
> search service.
>
>
> What do you think? (Just note that this is not final design, I'm not
> really happy with typography here, but it shows concept good)
>
>
>
> [1] http://www.elasticsearch.org/

Note that for the new library documentation layout a similar search feature is already implemented (although not yet online), so the data is available.

On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 11:48:39 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 16:40:32 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
>> I must respectfully disagree about retaining left justification.
>> I have 27'' monitor with resolution of 2560x1440 and left-aligned websites are really hard to read!
>>
>> There is a reason why most editors have "zen mode" which centers your code on a screen. It's easier to read when it's centered and not too wide.
>
> You can have the browser window centered on screen and have your preferred width. It doesn't make sense to have wide window if don't ever want anything that wide, then every site which fits the window width automatically has your preferred width, otherwise the designer would need to figure out everyone's preferred width and accommodate for that, but how?

I like my browser window maximized, that's how I've been using it for more than 10 years. And I'm not the only one. For other windows (editor/chat/etc) I have two additional monitors.
It si true that it's impossible to satisfy all tastes but in my experience majority of websites nowadays are centered.

But, when I say centered I mean having a maximum width of say 1200px, so that on most common resolutions it will be full-page website or it will be just slightly padded on both sides. Content would be left aligned, of course.

On resolutions larger than 1200px in width additions information could be provided (from both sides, so that content stays centered and thus in spotlight).


>> [1] http://devdocs.io/
>
> "Sorry, your browser is not supported". I would understand, if it was an FPS web game, but what advanced technology a documentation site absolutely can't live without?

Which browser do you use? I've used it only on Firefox (Aurora to be precise) and it works flawlessly.
That was just an example of how convenient is to have documentation filtered as you type. I'm not planning to make "devdoc for d", just to provide nearly instantaneously results as user types search query.

On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 12:04:11 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
> Am 19.04.2014 12:56, schrieb Aleksandar Ruzicic:
>> Ok here's a mockup of search concept I would like to implement:
>>
>> http://krcko.net/dlang.org/dlang-search-concept.png
>>
>> Search suggestions feature would surely require JavaScript but IMHO it
>> would be a really nice enhancement.
>>
>> Also, search suggestions would require existence of some search service
>> on the server. I believe that without too much effort an indexer can be
>> written that will feed data to ElasticSearch[1] which would be used by a
>> search service.
>>
>>
>> What do you think? (Just note that this is not final design, I'm not
>> really happy with typography here, but it shows concept good)
>>
>>
>>
>> [1] http://www.elasticsearch.org/
>
> Note that for the new library documentation layout a similar search feature is already implemented (although not yet online), so the data is available.

That's excellent news! Would it be possible to use it to search through language reference too?

On 4/18/2014 1:24 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Apr 2014 12:40:31 -0400, Aleksandar Ruzicic
> <aleksandar@ruzicic.info> wrote:
>> I must respectfully disagree about retaining left justification.
>> I have 27'' monitor with resolution of 2560x1440 and left-aligned
>> websites are really hard to read!
>
> Making something that works like this would be excellent:
>
> http://forum.dlang.org/
>

God no. I like forum.dlang.org and all, but scaling the font size when the window resizes is horrible UX. Example: If I shrink the browser window, for *whatever* reason, I expect not to have an over-zealous CSS decide "Oh! He must want the text to become ridiculously small! Ok!"

On 4/19/2014 3:45 AM, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
> On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 22:06:03 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> [snip]
>> Or just a little switch in a corner somewhere to change the
>> justification, with a cookie.
>
> That can be easily done (although I wouldn't use cookies) but I would
> prefer centered layout to be default option.

(left/right/centered) Layout != (left/right/centered/justified) text justification

I don't think anyone's argued against the page layout itself being centered (as long as you don't mean to center the text itself - that would be one of the worst ways for text justification).

On 4/18/2014 12:40 PM, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
>
> I must respectfully disagree about retaining left justification.
> I have 27'' monitor with resolution of 2560x1440 and left-aligned
> websites are really hard to read!
>

Why does everyone these days seem to forget that windows are resizable?

FWIW though, I find *everything* freaking unreadable and barely-usable on a 16:9 - good for media, worthless for computing.

> There is a reason why most editors have "zen mode" which centers your
> code on a screen. It's easier to read when it's centered and not too wide.
>
> Current design has no limitation on line width which (at my resolution)
> results in ~300 characters wide lines, and it's really unreadable.
>
> I would go for a maximum of 120 characters wide lines with content
> centered on larger monitors.


Text justification has nothing to do with maximum line width. "max-width" works perfectly fine with left-justified, too.

And left-justified makes it easier to distinguish individual lines, otherwise it's easier to loose your place when reading from one line down to the next line. Plus it does suffer from those inconsistently-sized spaces.

On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 21:34:31 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 4/18/2014 12:40 PM, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
> >
> > I must respectfully disagree about retaining left
> justification.
> > I have 27'' monitor with resolution of 2560x1440 and
> left-aligned
> > websites are really hard to read!
> >
>
> Why does everyone these days seem to forget that windows are resizable?
>
> FWIW though, I find *everything* freaking unreadable and barely-usable on a 16:9 - good for media, worthless for computing.
>
> > There is a reason why most editors have "zen mode" which
> centers your
> > code on a screen. It's easier to read when it's centered and
> not too wide.
> >
> > Current design has no limitation on line width which (at my
> resolution)
> > results in ~300 characters wide lines, and it's really
> unreadable.
> >
> > I would go for a maximum of 120 characters wide lines with
> content
> > centered on larger monitors.
>
>
> Text justification has nothing to do with maximum line width. "max-width" works perfectly fine with left-justified, too.
>
> And left-justified makes it easier to distinguish individual lines, otherwise it's easier to loose your place when reading from one line down to the next line. Plus it does suffer from those inconsistently-sized spaces.

As I've said in one of previous messages, text will be left-aligned, there is no way I would make it centered. I was talking about layout alignment.

I was talking about max-width as a means to keep text readable, as 300 characters per line is really too hard to read.

It seems I'll have to implement this design proposal in HTML/CSS to be able to better communicate design decisions.

On 4/19/2014 6:56 AM, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
> Ok here's a mockup of search concept I would like to implement:
>
> http://krcko.net/dlang.org/dlang-search-concept.png
>
> Search suggestions feature would surely require JavaScript but IMHO it
> would be a really nice enhancement.
>

I don't know anything about the specific search-suggestion engines, but as far as looks I (mostly) really like it. Only two comments:

- There should be some visual indication of the search box besides the text itself. It *looks* nice as you have it, but practically speaking it'd be a bit awkward to not be able to see the box itself.

- A *lot* of search boxes on the internet these days bake the "Enter search term here" (or whatever) text into the HTML, forcing non-JS users to delete the text before they're able to enter their search term. That's bad UX. Instead, the "Enter search term here" text should be *added* via JS and left blank in the raw HTML. That's a trivial way to ensure it works great for both JS and non-JS users.

On 4/19/2014 7:48 AM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 16:40:32 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
>
>> [1] http://devdocs.io/
>
> "Sorry, your browser is not supported". I would understand, if it was an
> FPS web game, but what advanced technology a documentation site
> absolutely can't live without?

I get "This site is asking to store data on your computer for offline use".

I always decline that sort of thing. Aside from games (which really belong outside the browser anyway), anything that can't be handled via a normal session cookie is questionable and doesn't belong on my computer.