dlang.org redesign n+1

Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Jan 21 08:30:38 PST 2015


On 1/21/15 6:46 AM, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org
> site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>
> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>
> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see
> Docs menu-item) is working.

This is awesome, and something I'd get behind. Here's a little feedback 
coming from a self-admitted dilettante:

* On my laptop it looks like this: http://imgur.com/v8TC1xq. I'm seeing 
the red menu at the top, the gray sparse box, and also an odd fragment 
of the next page which has a different background, a title, and a 
fragment of code snippet. The way I look at it is either you go 
balls-out with the sparse gray page and make it occupy the entire 
viewport, or you make it smaller to allow me to get to some content. As 
things are I can't stop wondering: "Why did they waste all that space so 
I can't see stuff?"

* The red band at the top has the logo misaligned vertically.

* The font in the menus at the top are disproportionally small compared 
to the red band's thickness. Possibilities are to increase the fonts, 
reduce the band and the logo thickness, or make the logo go out of the 
bound in some stylish/asymmetric manner.

* The search box flushes left with the rest of the menu. Flush right 
instead?

* The design clarifies that some of the homepage content is awful, which 
is good :o)

* I don't care much about the dark gray bands alternating with the light 
gray snippets. Especially the "conference websites" one makes it 
painfully clear the padding top and bottom are too large. To be frank 
they were poorly styled in the original homepage.

* The bottom red strip is too thick, font is too large, and the top 
padding is larger than bottom padding. There's that awful old legal 
notice that's not on the homepage. How old is your content?

* Generally I feel I must scroll too much through too little (and 
occasionally crappy - not your fault) content on the homepage. There's 
just so much "air". But that might be part of the page's very look and 
feel, so if people like it no problem.

* Where's twitter?

* Page doesn't seem to load on mobile at all.

* Clicking on "Overview" while I'm on the homepage does nothing. But 
there's no visual indication I'm already on "Overview". Also clicking on 
"Overview" or the logo seem to do the same thing. Oh, wait, not all 
menus are meant to work - take that back.

* Clicking on "Docs" takes me to spec.html. That looks nice except the 
"Download" menu item is rendered in almost invisible white.

* There's no accordion on "Language Reference" which makes for a really 
tall menu, sometimes even longer than the content itself. I find that 
hard to navigate. Statistically nobody will get to "Visual D" and 
"Community" :o).

* "Preview new Layout" is too small.

* Top-level menu entries without submenus, of which there's only one 
("Visual D") are rendered in an awkward black color that doesn't do much 
for me.

* The top and bottom spacing of submenus are not equal.

* The "Improve this page" and "page wiki" are not rendered properly.

* Layout is jerky as I reduce the width of the page: sometimes the 
right/left margins are really wide, even on thin viewports, thus wasting 
already precious space, then they get thin, then they get wide again, etc.

> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of
> hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change.
> After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just
> that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I
> hate that.

Yah, some editor support for ddoc would go a very long way.

> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak
> the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other
> pages.

Love that.

> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I
> could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into
> posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am
> supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has
> its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd
> and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they
> are, except me :)

Glad to hear that. I don't use a Windows machine so it's good things 
work for you.

FWIW we build the actual website on Posix; I'm not sure how much 
win32.mak does, but posix.mak builds both the release and prerelease 
libraries using the right compilers etc. You should have no trouble 
building dlang.org on linux following the instructions at 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md.

The rationale for NOT using /usr/bin/dmd etc. is that oftentimes the 
docs use specific features of the compiler, which means you need to 
build a specific library docs with the same compiler version. For the 
site proper we always use the development version of dmd (which by 
default we assume is ../dmd/src/dmd) so people can change the compiler 
and the docs in tandem. Once you get that in place things should work 
smoothly.


Andrei



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