Sorry to Jukka and BTS. I appear to have sent my replies to your inboxes.
No problem as far as I’m concerned, but since you meant to sent your
reply to the group, here’s the text (I might comment on it later but
just insert it here now):
On Sunday, November 4, 2012 12:33:16 PM UTC-5, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
Here is the site in question:
http://bookstacks.org/
This isn’t really a critique group (I’m not sure whether any HTML
critique groups survive on Usenet), but this tends to be a broad-minded
group and, besides, I’m just in the mood for critique…
Thank you. I knew this was the wrong place, but the last time I was the
appropriate one, there was nothing there but spam.
But before I get too into adding in eBooks and making it extremely
difficult for myself to rework things, I thought I would ask for
a general opinion about how it works, how useful it is, how it needs work, etc.
I mean, you know, something constructive.
Asking for constructive opinions does not generally work. People who
were about to be constructive may get pissed off, and people who
intended to flame you will do that more eagerly. (“Pissed off� Right.
By saying you want something constructive, you’re saying that you’ll
classify things as constructive and nonconstructive and will probably
ignore any *real* deep criticism.)
It's hard to avoid adding in those little manipulations, which of course
are meant to "head things off at the pass", as they say around here.
Instinct told me it wouldn't make a difference, and that's probably true.
So, let’s see. There’s only one image on the front page, your face.
Since people focus on images before texts, do you really want them to
look first at you? An author’s face normally belongs to an “About this
site†or “About me†page, not the front page. Sorry, I can’t suggest
what images would be more suitable, but not every page needs an
image. A
generic image of an old book, maybe?
Yes, that's a holdover from the site being on WordPress for so long, and
having an "About" page. This is why the heading on the front page is
"About This Site". I'll think about that.
On the front page, “About This Site†appears as main content, whereas
links to actual content of the site are in the ads section. I mean the
right-hand column, which is often taken as reserved for advertisements,
casual annotations, and other aside stuff.
Do you mean that the sidebar should be on the left, where it would be
more appropriate for navigation, or that I should do without a sidebar?
Each section in that sidebar is separate, and each were originally in
boxes, but I thought the boxes were superfluous.
The font choice is fine, at least for a person like me who is using
Windows 7 and therefore has Constantia installed. A screen-readable
serif font is a refreshing exception from the dominance of Arial (and
her evil sister Verdana), especially on a literary page that really
calls for a serif font.
Yes, I'm not up on Mac and Linux fonts, and can't remember what it was
that gave me Constantia in the first place. I think MS Word. So it tends
to cascade through the font list in terms of what is more readily available.
In formatting, you have produced a rather good look and feel of a book.
The first-line indents of paragraphs are somewhat excessive (2em),
though. Normally, around 1em is sufficient, especially when lines are
relatively short. Moreover, there is no upper limit on line length in
your code, so in fullscreen mode on a wide screen, they really get too
long. Setting max-width in em units is generally advisable.
I will explore that. I'll have to find a way for the columns to stay at
the right proportion.
The front page, as well the page containing War and Peace, uses Ascii
apostrophe (') instead of the typographically correct apostrophe (’,
U+2019). This is annoying especially since the page uses
typographically
correct em dash. In War and Peace, it disturbs me that American dashes
(em dash without spaces around) are used but quotation marks are
British
style (single quotes as basic quotes).
Thank you. I'll look into that.
Plato’s “Απολογια ΣωκÏατουσ†has no diacritic marks in the heading, and
the copy text uses the tonos only, i.e. monotonic Greek. I think
this is
unacceptable in a classical work. Polytonic accents and breath marks
should be used, as normally used in classical Greek works for
centuries.
Excellent. I trusted that what I was copying and pasting, since it came
from a good source, was correct. As you might guess, I am mono-lingual.
I just love messing with special characters.
In Tolstoy’s “ДетÑтвоâ€, there are some references like “[1]â€,
presumably
referring to endnotes. They should be turned to hyperlinks, possibly
implemented as “CSS tooltips†on supporting browsers.
I have the footnotes in regular title attributes, a la <span
title="Lorem ipsum globben globen.">[1]</span>. It's a kludgy thing to
do in some ways, but it means I don't have to use any JavaScript. I
didn't know about CSS tooltips, so I will look into that. I don't
generally use anything that I don't understand, though I realize many do.
The translator of War and Peace has not been indicated. Note that
although the original book is not protected by copyright, any
translation may well be. In any case, the translator and year of
translation should be specified.
That was just an oversight. I forgot to do it. Thank you.
Ian
