Walter Bright wrote:
> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> www.d.com is already taken :-(
>>
>> Not taken, reserved I think. Together with all other letters it seems.
> 
> It's a squatter with a "make offer".

IMHO, a one letter web site is impractical.
The site name sort-of drowns into the urls.

nick wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> 2) it uses javascript to change the look when a mouse is over
>> something, can the style sheet 'hover' thing be used instead?
> 
> It doesn't, actually. It uses hover to change the appearance. It uses
>  javascript to disable an outline that firefox draws around the tabs
> when you click on them. It is somewhat of a hack, which can easily be
> removed.

Those outlines are very handy!

First of all, tabbing actually is a good option in some situations (bad mouse, no mouse, or laptop in awkward place).

Second, I regularly open new tabs or new windows, instead of just clicking. (Especially when I want to do breadth-first browsing, which is practical on a new (to me new, that is) web site. Later coming back to the page I instantly can see where I was!

Georg Wrede wrote:
> nick wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> 2) it uses javascript to change the look when a mouse is over something, can the style sheet 'hover' thing be used instead?
>>
>> It doesn't, actually. It uses hover to change the appearance. It uses
>>  javascript to disable an outline that firefox draws around the tabs
>> when you click on them. It is somewhat of a hack, which can easily be
>> removed.
> 
> Those outlines are very handy!
> 
> First of all, tabbing actually is a good option in some situations (bad mouse, no mouse, or laptop in awkward place).
> 
> Second, I regularly open new tabs or new windows, instead of just clicking. (Especially when I want to do breadth-first browsing, which is practical on a new (to me new, that is) web site. Later coming back to the page I instantly can see where I was!
> 
I will take out the outline hack and sacrifice appearance for usability.

Walter Bright wrote:

> I understand, and I agree it can be improved. But I do like the spare, utilitarian look & feel.

No offense, but it still could look professional. (I don't care, but we're obviously talking about First Impressions of Newcomers.) :-)

It can be spartan, archaic, minimalistic, utilitarian, functionalist, whatever -- but a Professional Look is orthogonal to those attributes.


(

Case in point: the favicon.ico file on digitalmars.com looks just... eh, well, like a case in point.

Why not take the red graphic from the Digital Mars logo, and resize it to fit the favicon.ico?

)

nick wrote:
> Regarding wikis:
> 
>>I haven't done so already because of the numerous existing D wiki's. 
> 
> I understand that there are lots out there. Having an official wiki
> promotes the idea that D is a language that means business. It also
> makes it easy for newcomers to dive right in.

A wiki needs constant administration and hand-holding to stay sharp. Makin one The Official One, doesn't do much.

nick wrote:
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> "nick" <nick.atamas@gmail.com> wrote in message news:e3jc1v$1cm6$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>>> - desirable bonus: wiki should automatically highlight D code or provide plugins such that a code highlighter may be written.
>> PmWiki, which the DMedia site uses, does just that.  I'm not too knowledgeable with wikis, but it seems really well done.  Also, looking at the outputted HTML, it seems to use stylesheets and such, looks like modern HTML.
> 
> MoinMoin has come with high recommendations. There are already modules for highlighting Java code. Furthermore, D is easy to parse, so it should be quite easy to write a code highlighting module.
> 
> Another good thing about MoinMoin is that Python code is much more maintainable than PHP or Perl (MoinMoin uses Python).

Trac, used at http://www.dsource.org, has a MoinMoin wiki processor, and we have a D syntax highlighting wiki macro written by JCC7.  It's not as nice as MediaWiki from the standpoint of separating discussion and content into two separate areas of the wiki page, but it's still fairly functional.

BA

Georg Wrede wrote:
> It can be spartan, archaic, minimalistic, utilitarian, functionalist, whatever -- but a Professional Look is orthogonal to those attributes.

"Professional" isn't an indicator of quality but only that someone earns money with it (or tries to). The success of Google has shown that you still can make an impact if you focus on quality instead of what is considered "professional". Most "professional" sites suck hard. In my opinion many more sites should look and feel like the unprofessional http://sqlite.org/  It's about the first impression, as you said.


op

That one most people are better at following.  Although most interactive developers don't bother to send correct caching headers.

It's really not that bad, though, I can think of many examples of sites that were well-designed and were easy to make accessible while still following the design.

I just do interactive sites, though; I'm no artist.  As far as making the online presence of D feel right, accessible, interactive, and responsive - I could help.  But I can't help make it look pretty.

Anyway, I might also mention that whatever avenues you pursue, you also add to that list you have keeping internationalization and localization in mind.  Eventually you will want these things, I think.

Thanks,
-[Unknown]


> Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
>> If only more designers followed those rules...
>>
>> Sorry, just had to say it.  I deal with this sorta stuff at work.
> 
> Another rule I forgot to mention is that consideration must be paid to bandwidth - both for cost reasons, and because some people are still on dialup. The pages need to load fast, or people will go elsewhere.

Justin C Calvarese wrote:
> Tydr Schnubbis wrote:
> ...
>>> http://hcoop.net/~natamas/d/template.html (improvements pending)
>>
>> Somehow I think this one looks a lot better.  It was posted in another thread:
>>
>> http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mockup5ey.jpg
>>
>> It's simpler and I like the colors better.
> 
> I think they each have different strengths and perhaps weaknesses.
> 
> What kind of HTML does it take to look like for "mockup5ey.jpg"?
> 
> (Nick started off which a graphic file, too, but he eventually shared
> the actual HTML/CSS with us.)
> 

I think it's pretty easy to support both layouts with css-stylesheets. The blueish background looks a bit dirty in mockup5ey, but I guess it's a transparent png rendered with IE6. The template by nick looks promising. It's a bit dark, but it has a clean, official look'n'feel.

Firefox/Opera and others also support alternative stylesheets. If the user doesn't know how to switch between them, a cookie-based approach can be used. The biggest problem would be to make the html structure flexible enough to support different layouts. It's always a tradeoff between code complexity, rendering speed, bandwidth usage and overall 'coolness'. I would personally prefer a 'simple' layout without huge images, tables and detailed background textures.

Using lighttpd (http://www.lighttpd.net/) as web server instead of
apache really boosts up performance, especially when serving static content.

I'm still absolutely positive of the fact that web page layout matters. I tried to convert few friends of mine from Pascal and C/C++ to D in 2003. They were frightened by the terrible looking index page of digitalmars. Now that digitalmars uses stylesheets and we have that unofficial language wiki (http://www.quit-clan.de/docwiki/) it has been much easier to introduce D to several enthusiastic persons. Prowiki is highly functional, but it doesn't look as modern as mediawiki or trac.

-- 
Jari-Matti

Yet another reason I like MoinMoin: it has internationalization support. As far as appearances go, the site doesn't need to look super pretty. It is probably more important to not look bad than it is to look really good. It is important to conjure up as few negative emotions as possible in your average Internet reader/potential D enthusiast.

I have set up a temporary MoinMoin install on my Powerbook while I'm creating the D Theme for it (html template available here: www.hcoop.net/~natamas/d/template.html).


Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
> That one most people are better at following.  Although most interactive developers don't bother to send correct caching headers.
> 
> It's really not that bad, though, I can think of many examples of sites that were well-designed and were easy to make accessible while still following the design.
> 
> I just do interactive sites, though; I'm no artist.  As far as making the online presence of D feel right, accessible, interactive, and responsive - I could help.  But I can't help make it look pretty.
> 
> Anyway, I might also mention that whatever avenues you pursue, you also add to that list you have keeping internationalization and localization in mind.  Eventually you will want these things, I think.
> 
> Thanks,
> -[Unknown]