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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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