> It's just that Mozilla Navigator is this amazingly standards-compliant
> browser, with support for HTML 4.0, and CSS1, and a lot of CSS2, and the
> DOM, and all that funky stuff. And when people start it up for the first
> time (modulo bug 61121) ... they get presented with
> <http://mozilla.org/>, the sort of page which Todd Fahrner refers to as
> a `1996-99-era GIF-and-table HTML confection'. To be blunt, it smells.
Oh, indeed. Bugzilla's playing up again, so I can't look at your bug, but
I would contest the assertion that www.mozilla.org/ needs to be the
default start page at all. As long as we maintain its other aims, it will
always be a bad start page for a browser. What would be better would be a
mozilla.org/start.html (but in the right place, obviously) which is more
geared to that need.
> I have prototyped the page design on
> <http://critique.net.nz/project/mozilla.org/mozilla-org.jpg> using CSS,
I don't seem to be able to reach this. My browser just sits there
"Contacting critique.net.nz..."
> > > * get involved
> > > - quality assurance
> > > o how to report bugs
> > > o how to find duplicates
> >
> > Why is QA under "get involved" yet the stuff about contributing code
> > is not?
>
> Contributing code *is* under "get involved".
I was talking about your "developer info" section. Most of the stuff under
/quality now is directly analogous to that.
> | * get involved
> | - quality assurance
> | o how to report bugs
> | o how to find duplicates
> | - advocacy guides
> | - *** hacking ***
> | o downloading source
> | o getting CVS access
> | o building the Lizard
Yes, but then why isn't _everything_ under "get involved"? After all,
everything we do is people getting involved. My point is that people who
are already involved use the QA pages.
> >...
> > > - sponsorship
> >
> > <raises eyebrows>
>
> Dawn Endico wrote (by e-mail):
> |
> | we need a credits page for corporate contributors
> | (netscape, sourceforge, bluemartini, meer.net)
>
> And I don't see what's wrong with that. The Mozilla Organization has
> companies which donate build machines, servers, bandwidth etc. These
> companies deserve recognition.
No, that's fine. I just got the wrong end of the stick.
> Yes, but we still need to show the available translations for each page,
> because the site (like the rest of the project) is a volunteer effort.
> So (for example) someone who is fluent in Japanese, but who prefers to
> read Web pages (including mozilla.org docs) in English, can see `oh!
> there's no Japanese version of this page! I could translate it for
> them ...'
That would be all of them, then :-)
The problem with hand-translations is that they have to be kept up-to-date
with the main version, or else you need some method of marking them as not
up-to-date. But I accept the general point :-)
> > > * aesthetics of site should change every ~12 months
> >
> > Any particular reason?
>
> To keep it looking fresh.
Seems to me (natural conservative that I am ;-) that this is merely change
for change's sake. I like mozilla.org's current look, and it's been that
way for three years :-) Just because something's easy (with style sheets)
doesn't mean it has to be done.
> > > * URL as UI <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html>
Oops, my mistake. I thought Jakob's point was that URLs should *not* be
used as a method of site navigation, because that's bad UI, and I thought
you were agreeing with that point (which he didn't in fact make). Oops.
> > I still maintain that there are documents, like The Bugzilla Manual,
> > which are definitely "docs" and documents, such as the download page,
> > which are not. It's true, in the end everything is a "document", but
> > that's not what a docs directory means. It stands for "documentation"
> > :-) And I think it's a meaningful distinction.
> >...
>
> So where would you draw the line on these (hypothetical) documents about
> which are `docs' and which are not:
In any classification scheme there are things which fit in multiple
categories. The fact that this is the case does not invalidate the
classification scheme.
> `Docs' is just a contraction of the word `documents'.
Well, then, let's call it "doc", as a contraction of documentation. But if
you look at the source distribution of any software, there is a particular
class of manual-like texts which are found in a subdir "docs". Most people
understand what is meant.
Gerv
