Website message overhaul

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:j9ps5n$30nq$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Walter and I have been working on the website for a while. We want to 
> crystallize a clear message of what the D programming language is.
>
> Please take a look at http://d-programming-language.org/new/. The work is 
> content-only (no significant changes in style, though collapsible examples 
> and twitter news are a new style element).
>
> Feedback is welcome.
>

Haven't had a chance to read through it yet, but initial observations:

Con: Examples are never visible without JS. There is *no* good technical or 
stylistic reason for that. Like I was just telling someone on D.announce, if 
you need something collapsible, the way you do it is by leaving it 
uncollapsed in the HTML/CSS. Then, if you really want JS users to see it 
collapsed by default, you collapse it *via JS* upon page load. Or just make 
use of the noscript tag. There is *never* any reason to do it any 
differently than that.

Con: I don't think it's a good stylistic choice to have *no* sample code at 
all on the main homepage without clicking. Put a good short snippet right 
there for everyone to always see. Doesn't have to be anything fancy or 
all-encompassing. You can look through other langauge's sites for 
inspiration - it's quickly becoming standard practice for languages to have 
a short example on their website's homepage. It's often not much more than a 
hello world, just to get a little taste of the language.

Con: The little icons after external links are ugly and unnecessary. First 
of all, this isn't a wiki. More importantly, if anyone actually cares what 
links go to a different site, they can already tell that by hovering. If 
you're doing it out of worry that people will think they're still on the 
same site, well, that's *very* 1990's, and it was merely absurd paranoia 
even back then. It's not much better than those god-awful sites that have 
those rediculous and patronizing "you are now leaving our site" screens.

Con: While I don't have any objection to there *being* Kindle versions of 
the docs, I strongly feel it doesn't deserve a place in the default sidebar. 
Call it a matter of "pulling it's own weight". It's just not nearly 
significant enough, and it's easy enough (and perfectly sufficient) to have 
a link to the kindle version of the Book/Reference *on* the main page for 
the Book/Reference. Besides, we're not an Amazon advertisement here.

Plus: I don't see this new twitface element people are talking about. Yes, I 
realize *some* people like such sites, but that's no excuse for cramming it 
down *everyone's* face. Again, we're not here to be twitface's free 
advertising. So I like that whatever this new thing is isn't showing up.