Diwaker Gupta wrote:
> Its still very much under development and needs a lot of polishing
> still. So I'll appreciate any comments and feedback :)
Nominated for the understatement of the year :-)
This skin is a really nice piece of design work and a great addition
to what we can offer our clients if they want to go for this kind of
plain (fast, accessible, no-nonsense) site design.
Behaves well with increased font sizes too.
Would it be asked a lot to have a dummies guide to installing it in a
given Forrest? Or skype me through doing it and have me write it for
you :-)
> Actually something is terribly wrong with the recent versions of
> Firefox. They don't render the skin correctly. I have validated the
> XHTML on validator.w3.org and apart from the namespace issue, the skin
> validates *perfectly*. Konqueror has no problems rendering it either.
Funny. Firefox 1.0.4 for Windows seems to show none of the problems
mentioned.
> The other "guiding principle" in my theme is to NOT dictate the fonts
> used. I only specify the generic font family (sans, serif, monospace)
> if at all, so that the user can use his/her favourite defaults. In the
> skin, the only difference between visited and unvisited links is the
> bold font weight. Other than that fonts should not be different.
Yes, this is really useful. I always hate to have to read pages that
don't render well on my screen.
Thanks for this nice piece of work.
> So I'll appreciate any comments and feedback :)
Well, you asked for it.
- I like the use of brackets to denote selected tabs and menues. Very
obvious, applied very consistently, great!
- I like the way you show the current position in the page hierarchie
at the top of each page (::-thinks)
- Not so sure about the use of color (blue) and bold for used and
unused links and for menus.
= because the bold links in text tear apart the text blocks and force the
readers focus away from the text
= because the use in menus unveils the menu item as yet another link
Which is technically correct and might even make sense for users
to understand site navigation and yet - somehow I feel that a menu should
be different from a hyper linked page (very much a gut feeling).
So I'd try to use something else to show used menu items
= because the overload of color and font-style signals (bold, red,
blue) makes the menu look fidgety (?right expression?) and
distracts attention from the main page.
- I'd reduce the difference between text font size and headings a bit.
They seem too big in comparison (becomes more obvious if you use
increased font sizes).
- To be consistent I think your top level menu items should be
clickable to return to the top page (even though this is also possible by
clicking the tab).
- I would suggest not to color the current menu item and tab red
because
= in western color coding red means "stop"
= distracts too much attention from the page content
= brackets are load and clear enough.
- For large screens the base text has too long lines for
comfortable reading. I'd adjust the css so that the line length
(column width) will stop increasing at some point and leave an empty
column.
--
Ferdinand Soethe
