Website message overhaul

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/14/11 7:11 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure what to do about catering for people who disable JS. Other 
language sites (Go, Scala) do use JS and at least Go is unprepared for 
it being disabled. Scala seems to have a designed fallback mode.

A reasonable question is what percentage of people have Javascript 
disabled. I ran this query:

https://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=percentage+javascript+disabled+browsers

After looking through the top answers I inferred that the percentage is 
around 2% and declining.

> 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.

Okay.

> 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.

I added that only to further distinguish "See example" which keeps you 
on the page from "Read more" which takes you out.

> 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.

Okay.

> 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.

You'd probably see it if you enabled javascript. The idea is that 
streaming Twitter news adds dynamism to the page, which encourages 
repeat visits. I don't see anything wrong with using such a technology 
to keep people informed. We're not in the business of creating news 
aggregators.


Andrei