Re: [lojban] [WWWW] Goals for http://www.lojban.org/ (fwd)

[Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>]

Rob accidentally sent this straight to me.

- Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>
  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 15:54:54 -0500
From: Rob Speer <rob@twcny.rr.com>
To: Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: [lojban] [WWWW]  Goals for http://www.lojban.org/

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 12:38:23PM -0700, Jay Kominek wrote:
> The new page is much more pleasent to look at. :)

I agree. And it does better on the content side than the page Xod and I
had.

I'm rather impressed by the use of float sections instead of tables -
something I never learned.

However, a couple things about the page are kinda ugly. First, of
course, there's the blue borders around the images - get rid of those
with border=0 in the <img> tag. And the text runs right up to the edge
of each float section, making it hard to read. I see that this can be
set in "padding" properties, so those percentages just need to be
higher.

It rather looks like the right sidebar begins higher than the left one,
giving a rather lopsided appearance.

"You email" should of course be "Your email", if not "Your email
address".

I think the text in the margins could afford to be smaller. Right now
the left column is about twice as long as everything else. The purpose
of using a sans-serif font in our version was that sans-serif is easy to
read at small sizes. I don't even think it would be too much of a
problem to use sans-serif in the sidebars and serif in the main column,
if you so prefer. The style sheet you have should make that change very
easy to make.

It doesn't have to be as small as xod's version. He never uploaded the
version where I made the sidebar text bigger.

Next to the heading, the dates are the most prominent thing on the page.
That's just a bit weird now, but it could become quite a problem if
activity slows down on the site and the second thing a visitor sees is a
really old date. These could afford to be a couple of header sizes
smaller. On my screen, for example, "26 November 2001" appears on 3
lines.

The bullets are all on the outside of the text. That's a neat trick, and
I wish I had known how to do that on my version. But since your version
has extra space between bullet points anyway, it is not necessary for
the bullets to stick out to the side, and you could reclaim some space
in the sidebar by having the text wrap below the bullets.

-- 
la rab.spir
noi sarji zo gumri