D Online Presence

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Justin C Calvarese wrote:
> Tydr Schnubbis wrote:
> ...
>>> http://hcoop.net/~natamas/d/template.html (improvements pending)
>>
>> Somehow I think this one looks a lot better.  It was posted in another
>> thread:
>>
>> http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mockup5ey.jpg
>>
>> It's simpler and I like the colors better.
> 
> I think they each have different strengths and perhaps weaknesses.
> 
> What kind of HTML does it take to look like for "mockup5ey.jpg"?
> 
> (Nick started off which a graphic file, too, but he eventually shared
> the actual HTML/CSS with us.)
> 

I think it's pretty easy to support both layouts with css-stylesheets.
The blueish background looks a bit dirty in mockup5ey, but I guess it's
a transparent png rendered with IE6. The template by nick looks
promising. It's a bit dark, but it has a clean, official look'n'feel.

Firefox/Opera and others also support alternative stylesheets. If the
user doesn't know how to switch between them, a cookie-based approach
can be used. The biggest problem would be to make the html structure
flexible enough to support different layouts. It's always a tradeoff
between code complexity, rendering speed, bandwidth usage and overall
'coolness'. I would personally prefer a 'simple' layout without huge
images, tables and detailed background textures.

Using lighttpd (http://www.lighttpd.net/) as web server instead of
apache really boosts up performance, especially when serving static content.

I'm still absolutely positive of the fact that web page layout matters.
I tried to convert few friends of mine from Pascal and C/C++ to D in
2003. They were frightened by the terrible looking index page of
digitalmars. Now that digitalmars uses stylesheets and we have that
unofficial language wiki (http://www.quit-clan.de/docwiki/) it has been
much easier to introduce D to several enthusiastic persons. Prowiki is
highly functional, but it doesn't look as modern as mediawiki or trac.

-- 
Jari-Matti