On 1/21/15 6:46 AM, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org
site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
http://dlang.skoppe.eu
It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see
Docs menu-item) is working.
This is awesome, and something I'd get behind. Here's a little feedback
coming from a self-admitted dilettante:
* On my laptop it looks like this: http://imgur.com/v8TC1xq. I'm seeing
the red menu at the top, the gray sparse box, and also an odd fragment
of the next page which has a different background, a title, and a
fragment of code snippet. The way I look at it is either you go
balls-out with the sparse gray page and make it occupy the entire
viewport, or you make it smaller to allow me to get to some content. As
things are I can't stop wondering: "Why did they waste all that space so
I can't see stuff?"
* The red band at the top has the logo misaligned vertically.
* The font in the menus at the top are disproportionally small compared
to the red band's thickness. Possibilities are to increase the fonts,
reduce the band and the logo thickness, or make the logo go out of the
bound in some stylish/asymmetric manner.
* The search box flushes left with the rest of the menu. Flush right
instead?
* The design clarifies that some of the homepage content is awful, which
is good :o)
* I don't care much about the dark gray bands alternating with the light
gray snippets. Especially the "conference websites" one makes it
painfully clear the padding top and bottom are too large. To be frank
they were poorly styled in the original homepage.
* The bottom red strip is too thick, font is too large, and the top
padding is larger than bottom padding. There's that awful old legal
notice that's not on the homepage. How old is your content?
* Generally I feel I must scroll too much through too little (and
occasionally crappy - not your fault) content on the homepage. There's
just so much "air". But that might be part of the page's very look and
feel, so if people like it no problem.
* Where's twitter?
* Page doesn't seem to load on mobile at all.
* Clicking on "Overview" while I'm on the homepage does nothing. But
there's no visual indication I'm already on "Overview". Also clicking on
"Overview" or the logo seem to do the same thing. Oh, wait, not all
menus are meant to work - take that back.
* Clicking on "Docs" takes me to spec.html. That looks nice except the
"Download" menu item is rendered in almost invisible white.
* There's no accordion on "Language Reference" which makes for a really
tall menu, sometimes even longer than the content itself. I find that
hard to navigate. Statistically nobody will get to "Visual D" and
"Community" :o).
* "Preview new Layout" is too small.
* Top-level menu entries without submenus, of which there's only one
("Visual D") are rendered in an awkward black color that doesn't do much
for me.
* The top and bottom spacing of submenus are not equal.
* The "Improve this page" and "page wiki" are not rendered properly.
* Layout is jerky as I reduce the width of the page: sometimes the
right/left margins are really wide, even on thin viewports, thus wasting
already precious space, then they get thin, then they get wide again, etc.
Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of
hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change.
After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just
that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I
hate that.
Yah, some editor support for ddoc would go a very long way.
Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak
the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other
pages.
Love that.
BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I
could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into
posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am
supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has
its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd
and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they
are, except me :)
Glad to hear that. I don't use a Windows machine so it's good things
work for you.
FWIW we build the actual website on Posix; I'm not sure how much
win32.mak does, but posix.mak builds both the release and prerelease
libraries using the right compilers etc. You should have no trouble
building dlang.org on linux following the instructions at
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md.
The rationale for NOT using /usr/bin/dmd etc. is that oftentimes the
docs use specific features of the compiler, which means you need to
build a specific library docs with the same compiler version. For the
site proper we always use the development version of dmd (which by
default we assume is ../dmd/src/dmd) so people can change the compiler
and the docs in tandem. Once you get that in place things should work
smoothly.
Andrei
