[dlang.org] getting the redesign wrapped up

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 8 January 2016 at 22:32:59 UTC, anonymous wrote:
> My implementation of the redesign is pretty much complete.
>
> Check it out: http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/
>
> This is an implementation of a design done by one Ivan Smirnov, 
> brought forward by Jacob Carlborg [1].

Very nice work. Thank you for doing this.

> The dark forum widgets on the home page are in iframes. Their 
> styling will need to be updated at the source, which is 
> forum.dlang.org.

Once this is merged, would you be OK with working together on 
updating the forum to the new design?

> 2) Reviewing the code
>
> https://github.com/aG0aep6G/dlang.org/commits/Ivan-Smirnov's-redesign
>
> This is just one giant commit (the others are independent minor 
> fixes). GitHub refuses to show the diff for the style.css file, 
> because it's too big. Is this acceptable, or do I need to split 
> it up somehow? If I need to split it up, any advice on how to 
> do that?

I think this is fine as it is.

> 3) New Pages
>
> Aside from the overall style changes and menu reorganization, I 
> also added overview pages for the articles and for the tools:
>
> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/articles.html
> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/tools.html
>
> They feature new text that should be proofread.

Perhaps also link to (or even replace with) the wiki pages:

http://wiki.dlang.org/Articles
http://wiki.dlang.org/Development_tools

BTW, I've been meaning to make a MediaWiki skin based on the 
dlang.org design for a while.

> 4) Fonts
>
> Vladimir Panteleev has spoken out against web fonts [2]. His 
> argument is that they can look fine on one system but bad on 
> another. Indeed the recently changed code font on dlang.org 
> looks pretty bad for me while the default 'monospace' looks 
> just fine, which is why I reverted that in the redesign.
>
> The redesign uses a web font for its main font, though: Roboto 
> Slab. It looks good for me, but I'm not able to test it on a 
> large variety of device/OS/browser combinations. Maybe it's 
> fine, or maybe we should stay away from web fonts 
> categorically. I don't really have an opinion on this.

It looks good here (Firefox/Linux), and I agree that it fits the 
design nicely. I'll agree with Andrei, let's use it unless we run 
into some issues.

> 5) Justified Text
>
> Andrei loves it, everybody else hates it. I killed it as the 
> mockup didn't have it. Is that ok, or is justified text a must?

IIRC the main point of contention was hyphenation (IMO hyphenated 
text is unusual and harder to read on the web). I agree that if 
hyphenation is a must, then justified text can be an improvement, 
but generally it seems to be a highly situational question.

> 6) Red For Clickables Only?
>
> Currently, the site uses red almost exclusively for clickable 
> stuff. But it's also used as a highlight color for 
> non-clickable things. For example in phobos signatures:
>
> http://d-ag0aep6g.rhcloud.com/phobos/object.html#.Object
>
> The left borders of the signature boxes are red, and the 
> documented symbol is highlighted with red.
>
> Red does not signal clickability here. I don't like that and 
> I'd prefer to go with another color for generic highlighting, 
> reserving red for clickable stuff.

It's important to have some way to distinguish links from 
non-links, e.g. by underlining links (and only links). 
Unfortunately, in some places underlining all links doesn't work 
well, e.g. the "Jump to" indices in Phobos docs. I guess it's 
something that warrants some experimentation.

Perhaps just use bold without a color change for symbol 
highlighting? The red borders look fine to me, I don't think they 
present any ambiguity.

> 7) The Logo
>
> As requested by Andrei, this does not feature a logo change for 
> now. I'm going to make a pull request for the slicker logo 
> variant [3] when this is through.

Ironically, the current "official" logo is in the same legal 
position as the current design - we never got a confirmation from 
its author whether and how we can use it.