Re: [Straw-devel] CSS/Layout Suggestions

[Juri Pakaste]

On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 16:29 -0300, Steven Garrity wrote:
> I like the new layout of articles/items, but I wonder if it could be 
> better. I realize that the time for feedback/input on this has already 
> come and gone, but I'm only running the release versions, so 0.24 today 
> was the first I've seen of the new layout.
> 
> I've taken a stab at mocking up an alternative layout. Here's what I'm 
> going for:
> 
>   - I'm trying to make the content more prominent than the structure.
>   - For example, rather than labeling the title as "Title:", it is a
>     simple, strong, bold header tag and is therefor easily recognizable
>     as the title.
>   - Make the "Additional Information" a bit less visually prominent.
>   - Be sure to maintain a clear distinction between what is in the
>     content of the feed item, and what is additional info formatted
>     by Straw
> 
> Here's the HTML-based mockup: http://actsofvolition.com/steven/straw_test/
> 

Before we rush into changing the look of the article view completely
again...

There's stuff I like here, and stuff I dislike.

It does look, I don't know, maybe cleaner than the current view. Pretty
and pale. And I appreciate the goals.

The first dislike is the same Jan mentioned: lack of contrast. Pale
gray, especially in the footer, is not a good solution, I think. It
looks pretty, but you lose on contrast. Maybe there is a point where it
can be distinguished from black and still offer enough contrast. I don't
know.

The second thing is the fact that you can't visually see that the title
is a link. It's especially well hidden because the other links are
underlined (as they should be.) It might look silly with underlining; I
know large, heavy text usually does. I just think that the consistent
underlining is more important than having the text large.

I'm not sure that dropping the "Additional information" header makes for
better separation of content and structure. But it's true it demotes the
lower block in prominence.

I think I'm mostly for keeping the current layout. We might want to
adjust it a bit, however. First thing, let's make the background of the
feed header box less dark. In fact, best would probably be if it was the
same color as the widget background and also the border color should be
the same as the theme uses. Can you access the theme colors through gtk?

We could also give a try to dropping the "Additional information" header
and making the text in the the block slightly lighter colored.

Oh yeah, and if someone wants to again play with the HTML and make it so
the heading lines don't move around, I'd appreciate it :-) I noticed
it's not a gtkhtml2 problem, it happens with Gecko too: it has something
to do with having the table 100% wide, but I'm not quite sure what.

And another thing: we really should cache the contents of the CSS file,
so it wouldn't have to be read every time we display an article. We
should also add an environment variable that says to load it every time.

So thanks for the input, but I'm afraid I'm going to reject most of it
this time :-) I'd rather not change the view drastically with every
release.

-- 
[ Juri Pakaste | address@hidden | http://www.iki.fi/juri/ ]

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