Graham Anderson wrote: > On Sunday 07 May 2006 14:09, jdd wrote: >> I don't see there is really problem with tables, but I don"t >> like the new layout > > Everyone should heed this warning! > > I cannot stress enough the importance of leaving the design of an important > and busy website to people who have *significant* web design experience.
I can barely disagree more... a surprising high number of professional web sites are awfull, as any Linux user may know by direct experience this don't mean we must do anything in any direction. > The documentation page layout is now *broken*. The 'Other languages' box > now renders *below* the page footer in Firefox and probably on other browsers > too. this have nothing to do with the proposed documentation page. the "sidebar" (it's the mediawiki word for the left column) can only be modified by a sysadmin and is the same for all the pages, modulo some automatic parts like "toolsbox" and "other langages" this said, I think also the sidebar _must_ be shortened and only meaning full entrys used in the menus. > > Using tables for layout breaks accepted design principles for a few good > reasons. Two of the most important reasons are as follows. I wonder if you don't mix tables and frames. Frames are a powerfull layout system but largely deprecated for a variety of good (and bad) reasons. Tables are the only way in mediawiki to make columns on a page or have images cleanly setup. > > (1) The way the page may be rendered in different browsers on different > platforms is usually broken by the wrong and excessive use of table layouts. not true is tables are intelligently used (with relative width). "intelligence" mean, for me, "understanding". Many professional web designers don't understand what they do (usually they use frontpage and frontpage extensions - many others do a very good job and use vi :-). > > Visit the documentation page use the firefox view menu and go to 'Page Style' > and then select 'No Style'. Now look at the way the page is rendered and > scroll down the the table. See how most of the page scrolls sensibly in a top > to bottom manner, and see how the table breaks this by spreading across the > screen. anyway I don't like this page layout. We already have the sidebar, we can if it's absolutely necessary accomodate an other column, like the front page do, but not tables into tables like this my solution: http://fr.opensuse.org/Documentation is not that good :-(, but seems to me a better starting point > > Now imagine someone visiting this page in a PDA or other small screen device. honestly I don't think we can accomodate this. if we must, this needs special pages. mediawiki won't fit. (give a look at the source of any mediawiki page, it's a mess). A wiki is not the best choice for smart web pages :-(. > Or imagine how messy this will not look in a text only browser. try my link with w3m. the sidebar uses lot of space (but this can't be avoided), but the general layout is acceptable > Screen readers may incorrectly read back to the user information that's not > properly presented in tables. What is worse is the screen reader may not even > read any of the information to the user if the tables are nested. I know very well this problem (there are several visually impaired people in my local LUG). The solution should be to trigger the "printer" layout in mediawiki (remove the sidebar), but I don't know how to do this. jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
