On 5/16/10 22:04, Walter Bright wrote:
Charles Hixson wrote:
On 05/15/2010 02:00 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
The D web site is rather pedestrian, but at least it's easy on the eyes.
*Pedestrian*??
The D web pages are a marvel of clarity and utility. Compare them to
the Python web pages, which I rate a second best. Things are
documented with relative clarity, one can generally find what one
needs with a bit of searching, even if one doesn't know what it's
named. Etc.
The D web site has only two minor (*minor*!) problems
One is the search engine which doesn't work on local copies.
The other is that one needs to disable google translation on local
copies, or everything loads too slowly.
(The first of those is probably impossible to deal with, but the
second looks trivial.)
If by pedestrian you mean clean, clear, and easy to use, then give me
more pedestrian.
People often say it doesn't look professional. I agree it could probably
use better colors, etc. But for this kind of web site, I think it's just
wrong to use flash, javascript, or anything that takes a long time to
load. I don't like pages that have a tiny bit of content surrounded by
acres of flashy, blinky, hovering advertisements. I don't like websites
that sacrifice readability in favor of a "look". I don't like web pages
that refuse to reflow if the window size is changed. The site should
print properly, and be mechanically convertible to a reasonably decent
looking pdf.
The site needs to be friendly to search engines, and usable by screen
readers. Yes, there are blind programmers, and at least one blind D
programmer. It's obnoxious to make a site they cannot use.
I'm also old, and just don't like sites that use small fonts, cute
fonts, blurry fonts, fonts with poor contrast, etc. They're hard, even
painful, to read. When I was a kid writing letters to my aged relatives,
my mom told me that they'd struggle to read typical handwriting, and
that it's nice to use a typewriter instead. I always remembered that
advice, and when I started using word processors for letters, the ones
I'd send to them I'd always enlarge the font quite a bit. Web sites
should avoid setting specific font sizes, so low vision users can
enlarge it.
I recently completed a revamp of the digitalmars site that got rid of
the table based layout in favor of using floating CSS layout. The result
looks a bit nicer, and the printing should be much better.
About the font size, I like the font size that the D1 site uses better
than the one that the D2 site uses.
My sole problem with D is one that's probably impossible to address:
the lack of libraries. When I need libraries, I usually end up using
some other language. But it sure isn't the web page.
(DSource is marvelous, but most of the libraries listed appear to be
either moribund or morbid.)
The library situation hopefully will get better over time.
And thanks for the kind words about the site (!), it is nice to hear them.
