Stas Bekman wrote:
[Per Einar Ellefsen notifies that all headers look the same]
what i have done, is: - boldfaced the h1, h2, h3, h4 (which i think we should have done anyway). - included the path/breadcrumb for (_only_) this particular item : APACHE_SRC (the styles for this local path/breadcrumb is of course the same as the one at the top of the page)
so what you get is first of all more visible section headers (because they are bold) and secondly a complete path for the current chosen item. with that path (and its links) close to you, it's easier to see where you actually are and therefore easier to navigate the content _and_ therefore easier to understand the context.
well, click on APACHE_SRC in the table of contents and you see what i mean.
this solution is not so visibly seperated as you requested, but on the other hand it is user-friendly IMO. in fact, having just taken a look at it again i think it looks rather cool, also because it will (should) scale well if there's a long path.
As Per Einar has mentioned this solution won't "scale" where headers are long.
i don't understand you here stas. do you mean the actual relevant header won't scale well? or did you mean the breadcrumb/path idea won't scale well. both scale well here.
the breadcrumb/path idea. By 'scaling' I meant the length of the titles. The possible cons are:
1. very long concatenation of many long titles
2. pages with short sections where this overhead will be significant and instead of improving the experience, will make it worse.
You should to test with these 2 cases and you will see better what I mean.
If we do agree to proceed with this idea nevertheless, I suggest to improve the user experience by showing the actual nesting, similar to the old split version of the guide, e.g. see:
http://thingy.kcilink.com/modperlguide/install/Callback_Hooks.html
Click on the sub-menus to see how the nesting change, also note that childred and listed as well, if you click on parents.
I'm afraid this can be a problem with 2. but solves 1.
More over, I always try to make a parallel of our site with a real book. Where the nesting is clear by changing the size of the title and sometimes italizing the deepest level sub-titles. But the italized text may read bad on certain browsers if the font is not good, so we should stay away from heavy italizing, other then for special constructs in the text (e.g. filenames).
i like the parallel with a book. but a well-organized book has two major major advantages before a well-organized website, namely typography and navigation. about typography for our site i think we should at least stay away from italics for the headers. i much prefer either size or emphasize differences or a combination of those. about navigation, i actually consider the new "breadcrumb" a major boost. especially that particular file is very long and not easy to navigate. with a breadcrumb you are never alone (well almost) :)
Hmm, may be we do need to produce the split version after all. As in: http://thingy.kcilink.com/modperlguide/
Therefore I suggest not to overdesign and simply fix the stylesheet to
do the right thing.
when you say overdesign do you mean in the negative way, that it is trying to help too much and thus will be more confusing than helping or do you simply mean "too designed" like many graphic artists gets carried away?
yes. There are two ways people read the guide:
1. sequencial - read from the top to the bottom (no need for the nav help here)
2. selective - when learning a certain short topic or solving a problem: usually getting to the spot via the search or the TOC (no problem here as well)
So I'm afraid this extra info will be too much of a noise.
I wish tooltips had a better utilization, so this extra info could be displayed on demand. We could use DHTML for that, but I'm afraid we will release the new site in Apr, 2003 then.
Currently all headers are of the same size, which is wrong. Is this correct:
h1 1.2em h2 1.1em h3 1.0em h4 0.9em ??
apart from the fact that a size below 1.0em for a header more sounds or rather looks like a footer. our body default is (correctly) 1.0em so we might end up with headers smaller than the body-text (:
true :)
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