[dlang.org] getting the redesign wrapped up

[Saurabh Das 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].
>
> 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.
>
> Another external dependency is the This Week in D script. Adam, 
> it would be nice if the `setTwid` function could take the date 
> separately. That would allow me to word the text without having 
> "This Week in D" there twice.
>
> Other than those two little things I consider this done. From 
> my side it could be merged immediately.
>
> But I'm sure there are a thousand things wrong with this. Here 
> are some topics to get you started:
>
> 1) Legalities
>
> I mentioned this before, but noone reacted. Can we use Ivan's 
> work? Do we have his ok? Do we need it? Jacob mentioned that he 
> can't in contact with him anymore. Is that a problem?
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
> [1] http://forum.dlang.org/post/n53ps0$2j8f$1@digitalmars.com
> [2] 
> http://forum.dlang.org/post/xezfeilxblfkibldvsgg@forum.dlang.org
> [3] https://gist.github.com/aG0aep6G/0803ec5ae49f6afb0196

Again, thanks for doing this. The new design overall looks much 
more modern and approachable.

Some feedback I do have:

Fonts
-------
I do not have any problem with Web Fonts. In particular the web 
fonts created by Google are highly tested and render pretty 
similarly on many device/browser combinations. This is from 
practical experience.

On the font used, Roboto Slab: I feel that the serif nature of 
the font makes it clash with the clean design. A sans serif font 
would look much better.

Justified Text
----------------
I'm with Andrei on this one. Justified text is preferable to 
aligned text for large paragraphs which span the reading width of 
the page. It always makes it easier to read. For mini-paragraphs, 
sometimes left aligned does look better.

"Your Code Here" widget
-----------------------------
The widget that displays and allows you to run code in the 
browser has been a staple of the D website for a long time now. 
It's a great feature. There is one issue here: When the code 
length is large, it takes half the screen before any actual 
content begins. The grayed out header colour looks funny.

I suggest displaying the first 7-9 lines of code in the box and 
either making the box scrollable, or making it so that clicking 
on the box expands it to show the entire code.

The "Sort lines" example is about the right size. The "Round 
floating point numbers" is a bit large.

PS: Sorry if there were opportunities to give feedback on this 
earlier and somehow I missed it. I do hope you consider this even 
it if comes a bit late.

Thanks,
Saurabh