> Eww. Font size and image scaling should *not* be a function of window size. That's just...yuck. Let the system determine it's own appropriate base font size.
>
> And it's all in that horrible, ugly, "giant sized, yet minimal content and maximal blank space" style that's so inexplicably popular with the latest batches of web startups.
>
> *shudder*

Yeah, let's have a page like Peter Norvig (http://norvig.com). It's all about the content after all and if that is good the rest doesn't matter.

> I would use Foundation[1] instead of Bootstrap.
>
>
> [1] http://foundation.zurb.com/

Whatever gets the job done. I haven't yet worked with Foundation, but it looks reasonable. Maybe we can limit the SCSS dependency by checking in the rendered CSS, so only people working on the style would need a sass compiler.
One remark though, try to stay away from heavy client-side JS, dlang.org is mostly a static website and anything that makes you wait 5s for the site to be rendered misses the point.

> But I like to add fallback (that works even without JS, but better with JS) for that on old browsers which don't support that feature.

You could make a poll on the newsgroup or ask Andrei if Google Analytics has some numbers about the User Agents used to visit our site. My guess is that we can safely ignore IE8 for our target group.

On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 10:56:07 UTC, 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.

Yes it would. It could be done as an independent second step though.

> 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)

We can easily find better fonts :).

On Wednesday, 23 April 2014 at 07:02:50 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> I would use Foundation[1] instead of Bootstrap.
>>
>>
>> [1] http://foundation.zurb.com/
>
> Whatever gets the job done. I haven't yet worked with Foundation, but it looks reasonable. Maybe we can limit the SCSS dependency by checking in the rendered CSS, so only people working on the style would need a sass compiler.
> One remark though, try to stay away from heavy client-side JS, dlang.org is mostly a static website and anything that makes you wait 5s for the site to be rendered misses the point.

I was thinking of that too, but I used this approach on one of previous projects (both, SCSS and generated CSS files were under git) and it just gave me headache as the coworker was changing CSS and committing those changes which leaved SCSS and CSS files out of sync. But we could easily just agree not to do it, and state that we don't accept pull requests that have direct changes in CSS.

On Wednesday, 23 April 2014 at 07:28:51 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 10:56:07 UTC, 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.
>
> Yes it would. It could be done as an independent second step though.

Yep, that's how I plan to do it. First just to redesign the complete website then to add features like search suggestions.

>
>> 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)
>
> We can easily find better fonts :).

I'm not that unsatisfied with font faces (its Consolas nad Calibri), more with sizes/spacing/colors.. But this is something I will go over with a great graphics designer who will join me at the start of May, so it will surely be much better.

On Wednesday, 23 April 2014 at 07:16:53 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> But I like to add fallback (that works even without JS, but better with JS) for that on old browsers which don't support that feature.
>
> You could make a poll on the newsgroup or ask Andrei if Google Analytics has some numbers about the User Agents used to visit our site. My guess is that we can safely ignore IE8 for our target group.

I would support IE8 too, as that is the latest IE you can get on XP. I know that Microsoft has discontinued XP but there are still fare share of XP users out there..

But I will leave all that cross-browser tweaking for last stage..

On Wednesday, 23 April 2014 at 03:20:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Trying to be clever? Obviously not.
>
> I don't understand the motivation of this quip.

You don't understand that it is offensive to respond to an intelligent question by posting a Google query? As a project maintainer you should know better.

If dlang.org is being used by a programmer for 2-3 hours daily, then it is his use scenario that matters. The ability to adapt is more important for a documentation site than for a news site.

There are many good reasons to scale up to insane widths, basically to cut down the length of the rendered page to get an overview. To get less prose and more code on the page. Many of the dlang pages suffers from being too long, information sought is "hidden".

The user is always right… as the a designer you cannot tell the user he is wrong (well, you can, but that will only piss him off). So if Kagamin is comfortable with wide windows then that most certainly is the right thing for him.

Anyway, you guys are taking this process in reverse. You should start with use cases, then the requirements, then content, then functionality, then marginal design, then figure out what you need in addition in terms of styling.

The current documentation is not very user friendly, no amount of styling will fix that. Styling will only make it look like you have your priorities wrong. Put a dress on a pig and it will still be a pig, an odd one. (In the commercial sector you start with stylish mockups, but that is only a political move to get thumbs up, it is not a good idea since it can lock down expectations too early.)

A redesign ought to:

1. cut down on the number of operations to find the information sought.

2. maximize vertical information flow to avoid exessive scrolling (that means get rid of the top bar on doc pages)

I think you need to improve ddoc and get more semantics into the markup.

> Today's crop of browsers are tabbed, and for many users the position of the browser window is dictated by external constraints (relation to other windows, external monitor or not etc) and it's unreasonable to demand resizing the window whenever they swap tabs.

I would image the primary usage scenario is to have dlang alongside your editor. (Doing a mobile-first design for dlang is something I don't get the point of.)

Ola.

On Tuesday, 22 April 2014 at 20:01:27 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> https://www.google.com/search?q=page%20width%20study#q=optimal+page+width+for+reading&safe=off

The first link say 100 characters per line. If 100 characters equal to page width, then page width is the optimal line length.

On Wednesday, 23 April 2014 at 06:47:58 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> Yeah, let's have a page like Peter Norvig (http://norvig.com). It's all about the content after all and if that is good the rest doesn't matter.

There's a middle ground here.