allan wrote:

Stas Bekman wrote:


well, granted, the content looses a little focus beeing
box-border-less. i dont mind that at all. in fact i regard
it as feature (!). when i surf a site (that i have never
visited before) the most important thing focus-wise for me
is in a way not the content but the navigation.
can you follow me? i mean, there is no way (in either
design) that you feel lost (navigation-wise) at anytime - on
the contrary.

true, if you navigate a lot. This is not the case with perl.apache.org
-- here you spend most of the time sitting in one place and reading the
docs.



but is that an argument for using boxes and contrasting bg? if we had a lot of commerical crap flying around pur pages i would agree but the very basic of our design is so simple - you just start reading from a point and then downwards - there are nothing distracting in your way - it just like a normal word-document or whatever. the way i see it we simply (basically) just have this:

- menu
- content area

everything in the content area is documentation, ie stuff
that people want to sit and _read_ and move inside. correct
me if im wrong, but i think if you take almost any
word-processing editor or text-editor or dtp-program (at
least for windows and macintosh) they will default have a
white background-color and a black default font - i reckon
there is a reason for this. the finished document from such
a word-proccesor will more often than not look close to our
design in the content area. a header (often centered), some
teaser text, base text with some headlines etc.


well you brought a good example to prove yourself wrong :) The word processors have a separate box for the editing window. And the rest of the navigation (tools in this case) are in separate physical boxes. makes sense?

Of course in the case of the wordprocessor you don't need an extra bg contrast, you already have a physical window! Though, they do put all the tools onto a different background, very contrasting with the editing window.

I don't necessarily think that word-processor is the same concept, but you brought this on yourself :)


anyway, i think that you and i simply disagree on this and
if i cannot persuade you by a good design, then too bad.


Actually I don't try to disagree with you, I just think that making the content stand-out helps.

I think the main point is that navigation should be there, but it's not the purpose of the site. Therefore it shouldn't standout the same way the content does.


i am working on a new design similar to the one from yesterday.

screenshot from ie5:
http://www.bullitt.suite.dk/div/download/Picture_34.gif


looks good.


do you like any of those ideas - the bar-widget is not
finished ...


very neat! And as Thomas has commented, do use tables if you need.


yes, it probably is not user-friendly but on the other hand
not exactly hostile either :-)
its not like the menu takes up a lot of words and space. to
me this particular issue wrt the menu is a very small sacrifice.
btw, if you turn off stylesheets its in fact more
user-friendly than the original design IMO.

But why? because it looks fancier?


centered text looks IMO fancier here yes (dont know why). titles are also often centered, so people are used to centered text from time to time.


nope, this argument doesn't fit here :).

Titles are not coming immediately one after another, but separated with at least one or more paragraphs of text. Therefore it's easy to read a centralized title, because it's single. And usually you want people to pause after reading it. That's why you use a bigger font for titles.

When you centralize a menu or any other number of subsequent lines of varying length, you make the user work harder, since her eyes have to scroll left and right to find the beginning of the line, leading to a degradation of the use experience.

it's all physics :)


Why do you want users to turn CSS off?


no no no, not at all. but i guess some people do turn css off, maybe for userbility reasons and _if_ they do turn it off our design must still be ok.

I absolutely agree here. See my comments about lynx (text browser) in one of the prev email, where we need to add new lines to separate the menu and the content.


_____________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman             JAm_pH      --   Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/      mod_perl Guide   http://perl.apache.org/guide
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