Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 02:08:47 -0400 From: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1129010928.34f522@mired.org> To: www@freebsd.org Subject: Problems with new web site design Message-ID: <17220.49007.903011.223246@bhuda.mired.org>
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Got a couple of things that don't work: In Camino 0.8.4, Firefox 1.0.7, and emacs-w3m version 1.4.4 using w3m version 0.5.1, the mirrors pull-down list does nothing. Making a selection doesn't do anything. Oddly enough, it works properly in w3m version 0.5.1 run on it's own. I think you need a submit button. In emacs-w3m, w3m and FireFox with styles disabled, the page structure is just a long list and beastie doesn't show up. That makes it ugly and hard to use. The fix is to replace the current div soup with the appropriate table tags so the page gets layed out sanely if CSS isn't being used. You might want to put a paragraph in with a property of "display: none" that explains that because CSS is disabled the page appearance isn't optimal. Beastie doesn't show up in my Camino 0.8.4. That's probably because I've got it set to use my colors instead of the page colors, which on most browsers disables the loading of background images, and that's how the image gets loaded, even though it's not used as a background image. Once again, the solution is probably to replace the div soup with structural markup, and make the image part of the content. Come to think of it, having beastie relagated to the background is sorta sad. The Large/Normal text links don't do anything if JavaScript is disabled or otherwise unavailable. The right fix is to replace the javascript with links to a version of the page that loads the appropriate style sheet, but I'm not sure that can be done while still letting JS-enabled browsers switch style sheets without reloading the page. If nothing else, wrapping the contents of the li tag that contains those two links in a noscript tag will make them not appear in browsers in which they aren't functional The "Skip section navigation" link is broken. There doesn't appear to be an element on the page with the name "contentwrap", which is the target of that link. The new site looks much better when the browser is configured the way the designers expect them to be. However, as listed above, it doesn't degrade very well when users tweak the configuration of their browsers. The old site didn't look as nice in a default browser configuration, but it stood up to strange browser configurations a lot better. It's not hard to make a site that degrades gracefully, but the run of the mill web site doesn't bother. FreeBSD is better than the run of the mill software; I think it's web site should be as well. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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