>> 1. Should we keep the mega dropdown? >> >> I know there are some varying opinions on this — I personally like it, >> but it definitely needs to be constrained to be relatively short for >> each of the categories. I've had a stab at (significantly) reducing >> the size of the documentation menu based on the stats on us3 and my >> own gut feelings on what's actually commonly used. Hopefully that's >> helped! > > I'm not even sure what the "mega dropdown" is, but I'm assuming it's that > top menu that slides down when you click on it? I think it looks OK. I > don't see anything particularly wrong with it that would suggest changes. >
The trimmed down version is less mega than it used to be, but it's still bad. I vote we kill it in favor of landing pages plus good second-level navigation (like what exists in the documentation pages on the left-hand side). > The only thing I worry about is how end users might perceive this change. I > have to admit the manual pages actually did look more readable to me in the > regular site than they do on the beta site right now. Everything just seems > way too compact for my taste. We need to kill that right-hand "TOC" bar. I was in the middle of eliminating it when I was hired full-time. That means we need to find a place to change languages and report bugs, but the rest can simply be eliminated. That frees up a significant portion of clutter. Also, which bloke made that thing centered in the page? I had it left-aligned (or maybe it wasn't but was *supposed* to be). That's also killing the amount of real-estate we have. > Some of those CSS rules are also fairly rigid and I'm willing to bet that > if it were to come time to start changing them it would require a lot > of re-factoring. At least that's my take at first glance. Perhaps it would > be rare that the CSS will change, but it should be the case that any CSS > change should not introduce a need for re-factoring HTML. It was quite a > long time ago when I tried to fix the CSS for the user notes changes I > introduced and I remember it being very awkward how the divs had such > unexpected inheritance from positioning rules in the styling. Could > probably be an easier fix than I remember, however. It's *extremely* brittle. I've tried to improve it in that regard but part of the problem is that there aren't enough container elements in the HTML to facilitate the design. Making the header for each box appear outside of it is nasty work. --- All in all, I'm in favor for *not* launching this on January 15th. The site has come a long way, especially in the last two years, but I personally will not advocate launching it in its current state. That being said, I do have some time this week to actually work on it. -- PHP Webmaster List Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
