Re: SEUL: Web Site Prototype

[Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 1999 at 12:05:15AM -0600, Michael Viron wrote:
> If you have any suggestions for the SEUL/edu prototype, please don't
> hesitate to send me an e-mail.

Well, a few comments... I don't think it's a good idea to do away with
underlining the links.  It's become popular in commercial sites, and
so people aren't as confused with it as they used to be, but it's still
(IMHO) a bad idea unless there's a compelling reason.

I think it also might rely too heavily on stylesheets.  It would be
nice if you could change the stylesheet and change the look for the
entire site, but I don't think that's even possible in a theoretical
way -- stylesheets can only change the look of individual elements,
not the structure of the elements.  Without changing the structure
of the elements you can't really change the look.  XSL/XSLT is one 
possible way to do this, but I've only heard bad things about that...
anyway, maybe Zope would also offer a way to abstract the look more
completely.

Also, the stylesheet means another file needs to be retrieved in
order to render the page.  Inline stylesheets (via <style></style>)
mean more maintenance, but are advantageous for rendering.  The
maintenance would be fixed if we were using something that
abstracted the look, since it could add the style in as well.

Stylesheet support is also really spotty.  My own experience
using stylesheets has hardly made me love them -- they can refine
the look quite nicely, and as long as it's a refinement it doesn't
matter if everyone doesn't get to see it.  But table widths and
the sort seem a bit extreme to put in the stylesheet, especially
because they relate to icons and other things used in the page,
which needn't otherwise be tied to the stylesheet.  I think at
this point -- and for the foreseeable future -- stylesheets should
not play an essential role in the page.

I'm not a big fan of menus -- though others may like them.  I've
haven't really asked people enough to get a good feel.  The ones
on the bottom of sites, like:

        Main | Contact | Reference | Yadayada

are good, I think, and don't otherwise intrude on the web page.
Menus seem like they can take a lot of space, and on the web they
are variously useful and useless, so people can't consistently
place their faith in menus for navigation.  Expandable menus are
nice, though.

My last (hopefully constructive) criticism would be the use of
pixel-widths in tables as opposed to percentages.  It wastes a
lot of the screen space for people with higher resolutions,
and can make it harder to resize pages for doing multiple things
on the screen (when you have multiple not-overlapping windows).
I expect (hope) that people will be using the site like this,
especially if it has good HOWTOs on it.  (this is also part of
the issue with the menu as well.

I think you could just make the main table have a width of 100%, 
put a pixel width on the menu column, and let the rest expand as 
necessary.  With simple tables I haven't had much problems 
getting this to render properly.

Something that's just occured to me -- I'll be doing this in the
future as well -- is that titles/subtitles will render better
on Lynx if you place <center></center> around them instead of
using table-based or stylesheet-based centering (which Lynx will
ignore).  (Lynx is also a place where menus can be annoying)


-- 
Ian Bicking         / 4869 N. Talman Ave. Apt. G, Chicago, IL 60625
bickiia@earlham.edu / http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~bickiia