New Python.org website ?

[projecktzero]

http://beta.python.org

Looks great! Looking forward to the day when it goes live.
Note: The pics don't bother me.

 

[Tim Chase]

http://beta.python.org

In both Mozilla-suite (1.7) and FireFox (1.5), the links on the
left (the grey-backgrounded all-caps with the ">>" at the right)
all intrude into the body text. They're all the same length:

ABOUT>> covers the "T" in "The Official Python..."

NEWS/DOCUMENTATION/DOWNLOAD all intrude into the pyNASA image

COMMUNITY and PYTHON-DEV cover a little more than half of the "W"
in "What is Python?"

PYTHON-DEV and LINKS cover a bit of the text in the "What is
Python" section (a the moment, the "P" in the initial "Python"
and the "R" in Rossum)


The problem persists into other pages as well (such as the
documentatin page, etc).

Functionality-wise, it works like a charm and other than the
intrusion of those nav-bar bits, it looks good too.

-tim

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Tim Chase enlightened us with:

In both Mozilla-suite (1.7) and FireFox (1.5), the links on the left
(the grey-backgrounded all-caps with the ">>" at the right) all
intrude into the body text.

Looks fine here on Firefox 1.5 and Konqueror 3.4.3.

The site looks really nice! I think this is going to make a difference
in the amount of people taking Python seriously.

Does anybody know what kind of license covers the website?

Sybren

 

[Tim Chase]

In both Mozilla-suite (1.7) and FireFox (1.5), the links on the left

Looks fine here on Firefox 1.5 and Konqueror 3.4.3.

Just in case anybody is interested, I've posted screenshots of
how it comes out here (minus the ugly colors when 24-bit images
are reduced to 256-color GIF files) in both MozSuite and FF:

http://tim.thechases.com/pythonbeta/pythonbeta.html

I did try it both with and without JavaScript enabled (which
occasionally alters the behaviors of sites when the webdev
assumes that everybody runs with JS), but had no variance.

-tim

 

[sjdevnull]

Just in case anybody is interested, I've posted screenshots of
how it comes out here (minus the ugly colors when 24-bit images
are reduced to 256-color GIF files) in both MozSuite and FF:

FWIW, I'm seeing the same overlap as Tim, in Firefox 1.5 and Konquerer
3.2.2.

 

[JW]

http://tim.thechases.com/pythonbeta/pythonbeta.html

Very strange. With FF 1.0.7, I can just get the buttons to violate the
next column if I "View>Page Style>Large Text", but I wouldn't have noticed
it unless Tim had pointed it out. Tim's gifs are much worse than what
I see. WIth ""View>Page Style>Basic Page Style", it looks really good.

Jim Wilson
Gainesvlle, FL

 

[sjdevnull]

Very strange. With FF 1.0.7, I can just get the buttons to violate the
next column if I "View>Page Style>Large Text", but I wouldn't have noticed
it unless Tim had pointed it out. Tim's gifs are much worse than what
I see. WIth ""View>Page Style>Basic Page Style", it looks really good.

Mine looks like Tim's gifs, with "Basic Page Style".

 

[Brendan]

Steve

I didn't realize Python.org was being revamped. The site looks
awesome!
One thing I noticed: The mac download site still references Jack
Jansen's site, which hasn't been updated since 2004 afaik. These days
I get most of my mac python downloads from
http://pythonmac.org/packages/

Brendan

 

[Tim Parkin]

Tim Parkin wrote:
[snip..]

Hi Fuzzyman,

Thanks for the feedback and volunteering to contribue... The list of
already built sections is not really up to date but I have added a few
tickets to the trac on some sections of content that need working on. If

Great - can you provide a URL please ?

I had a browse through the tickets, and dumb old me couldn';t find
them.

I'd be well pleased to be able to help.

Thanks

Fuzzyman
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml

Have a look at the tockets on http://psf.pollenation.net there are a
couple of content tickets.. if you put your name down (or just add a
comment that you are working on them) then there won't be a problem.
There are only a couple of people working on the content at the moment
so the more the merrier.. email me when you fancy doing something and
I'll try to make myself available on IRC or something similar.

Tim

 

[Martin Maney]

In particular, creating a good-looking design that remains readable in
all possible browser configurations is impossible. Getting one that is
readable in all reasonable browser configurations is hard, unless you
make your definition of "reasonable" very narrow.

Nah, it's very simple, if you can let go of the wrong-headed notion
that the web is just like print media. Of course that means you're
unlikely to win any design awards, or even get a lot of commecnts about
how spiffy your web site looks, because all the design geeks will judge
you by the inapproriate standards of print media. You may, however,
get pats on the back from people who actually use the site, and
appreciate a readable, logical layout far more than design school gloss
(and fonts too small to be easily read by many; no, Aahz, IMO your
solution throws out far too much along with the bath water, though I
have to agree that the font size problem vanishes if one uses a
text-mode browser <grin>).

From a quick look, the beta appears to commit the same error as every
design (as opposed to usability) driven web site in the world: it makes
the running text smaller than the user's default. It's as if they care
more about how it looks than whether I can read it (as far as I can
tell, that's exactly the case, though it may just be that few are
willing to admit that the designs that they've learned to make, and
that do work well in high-resolution print, just suck on the web where
a high resolution screen is coarser than a bad fax. bad artists, the
lot of them, who persist in ignoring the characteristics of the medium
they're working in).

It's otherwise nice, and I didn't see any problems with overlapping
texts (in Firefox, etc.) at any halfway reasonable window size, but
perhaps that was corrected already. The name of the city in Sweden is
mangled in every encoding I've tried - the headline is proper UTF-8,
but the mention in the paragraph is weird.

 

[Mike Meyer]

Nah, it's very simple, if you can let go of the wrong-headed notion
that the web is just like print media.

Never had it. Gave up trying to drive it out of peoples heads over a
decade ago.

Of course that means you're unlikely to win any design awards, or
even get a lot of commecnts about how spiffy your web site looks,
because all the design geeks will judge you by the inapproriate
standards of print media.

Well, if you lower the defintion of "good-looking design" far enough,
it's simple. Those design awards don't go to sites that I consider
good-looking, though. Their standards seem to be driven by advertising
concerns, and not readability or usability.

If you ignore the designed-for-advertising goals, there's a lot of
good information about design to be had from the print media. While
some of it is totally inappropriate on the WWW (like ratios of page
dimensions), a lot of it is still applicable (like choosing coherent
font sets). If you look, you'll even find advice on how to pick fonts
for low-resolution output devices.

<mike

 

[Fernando Perez]

In both Mozilla-suite (1.7) and FireFox (1.5), the links on the
left (the grey-backgrounded all-caps with the ">>" at the right)
all intrude into the body text. They're all the same length:

Just as an FYI, I see the same problem under Linux, using Firefox 1.0.7 and
Konqueror 3.5. Galeon 2.0.0 renders it correctly.

I am using a 1920x1200 screen, so if there is any hard pixel-based design in
a website, I'm likely to see it garbled into a mess (though the regular
'old' python.org renders just fine on all the browsers I have installed).

Kudos to those doing the work, I just hope these problems are ironed out
before going live.

Cheers,

f

 

[Tim Parkin]

Nah, it's very simple, if you can let go of the wrong-headed notion
that the web is just like print media. Of course that means you're
unlikely to win any design awards, or even get a lot of commecnts about
how spiffy your web site looks, because all the design geeks will judge
you by the inapproriate standards of print media. You may, however,
get pats on the back from people who actually use the site, and
appreciate a readable, logical layout far more than design school gloss
(and fonts too small to be easily read by many; no, Aahz, IMO your
solution throws out far too much along with the bath water, though I
have to agree that the font size problem vanishes if one uses a
text-mode browser <grin>).

Fortunately, what you are asking for is to be provided just the plain
text information with sufficient semantic markup to indicate logical
groupings of text such as headers, lists, etc. You've got that with the
new website, just disable your styles sheet.

design (as opposed to usability) driven web site in the world: it makes
the running text smaller than the user's default. It's as if they care
more about how it looks than whether I can read it (as far as I can
tell, that's exactly the case, though it may just be that few are
willing to admit that the designs that they've learned to make, and
that do work well in high-resolution print, just suck on the web where
a high resolution screen is coarser than a bad fax. bad artists, the
lot of them, who persist in ignoring the characteristics of the medium
they're working in).

Absolute nonsense, would you prefer we take our cue from. Just for your
information, I've never worked in print design in my life. People tend
to have a 'preferred' font size for working in. This is normally smaller
than the standard font that is delivered on the standard system running
a standard browser. For this vast majority, it aids usability for them
to have a smaller than normal body font. Possibly in an ideal world, all
websites would not set a body copy font size and it would make sense for
each user to pick the one that most suited them. Unfortunatley, if we do
that, the majority of sites break so whatever we do is a *compromise*.
I'd like to live in the world where we don't have to do this.

As a matter of interest are you a professional design, web architect,
empassioned ameuter web designer or just an observer making casual
comments? (it's just that if you're a professional or empassioned
amateur, I'd like to know how you managed to deal with the same balance
and which group of users you would choose to cater for more)

It's otherwise nice, and I didn't see any problems with overlapping
texts (in Firefox, etc.) at any halfway reasonable window size, but
perhaps that was corrected already. The name of the city in Sweden is
mangled in every encoding I've tried - the headline is proper UTF-8,
but the mention in the paragraph is weird.

Yep.. it's just a double encoding problem.. the source was iso8859-1 and
it got reprocessed as utf8.

And thanks for the feedback.. it all gets listened to. (btw, we're also
adding supplementary style sheets for different purposes - one for a
larger text size for instance - a beta of the large text style on is
available on the beta site at the moment, it still needs a couple of
tweaks with the menu)


Tim

 

[Tim Parkin]

Mine looks like Tim's gifs, with "Basic Page Style".

Hi,

I've got an old copy of the html and tried to fix the general problem.
It's currently on another website

http://pyyaml.org/downloads/masterhtml/

Feedback appreciated (it's just the left hand nav width I'm concerned
about, all the other html and some styles are probably old). I've tried
this with 'min font size' adjustments and it doesn't seem to break. If I
don't get any bad feedback I'll roll the changes out.

Many thanks

Tim

 

[JW]

http://pyyaml.org/downloads/masterhtml/

Feedback appreciated ... Many thanks

Again, with FF 1.0.7 (on FC4 Linux BTW), the left column no longer
violates the right. However, "View>Page Style>large text" makes the
button annotation smaller than "View>Page Style>Basic Page Style".

Please understand, web programming is not my main axe. I'm in no way
asserting my observations are meaningful .

Jim Wilson
Gainesville, FL

 

[Tim Parkin]

Again, with FF 1.0.7 (on FC4 Linux BTW), the left column no longer
violates the right. However, "View>Page Style>large text" makes the
button annotation smaller than "View>Page Style>Basic Page Style".

Please understand, web programming is not my main axe. I'm in no way
asserting my observations are meaningful .

Yep... I haven't tweaked that one yet good to know it's not breaking
though, many thanks for the feedback.

Tim

 

[Tim Chase]

The nav styles have crept back in sync with the rest of the

site.. ;-) can you check again and tell me if it looks ok (and
if not get me another screenie?)

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. It looked fine from
home, but the originals were snapped back at work (where my
configuration is diff.)

With the regular style, they don't overlap, but they look cramped:

http://tim.thechases.com/pythonbeta/pythonbeta3moz.gif

With the "large text" page style, the original problem returns:

http://tim.thechases.com/pythonbeta/pythonbeta3mozLP.gif

Both shots are from Mozilla Suite 1.7, but they look about the
same in FF.


It seems to be a font-size issue. When I crank the font rather
small (using ctrl+plus and ctrl+minus), the overlap becomes
pretty bad. When I crank the font-size up larger, it seems to
make the problem go away (except for the fact I end up with fonts
that can be read across the room This symptom is worse in FF
than in MozSuite, though I might not have fonts set the same way
(one may have a minimum-allowed font size, while the other may
not, or something like that).

Using the dev tools in Mozilla suite, it looks like you've got a
<DIV> section (id="body-main") with a fixed margin-left property
of 15em (coming from the styles/styles.css file). Thus,
depending on your font-size, the body-main element will be
further left or right.

Hope this helps you figure out what's goin' on.

-tim

 

[Tim Parkin]

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. It looked fine from home, but
the originals were snapped back at work (where my configuration is diff.)

With the regular style, they don't overlap, but they look cramped:

http://tim.thechases.com/pythonbeta/pythonbeta3moz.gif

With the "large text" page style, the original problem returns:

http://tim.thechases.com/pythonbeta/pythonbeta3mozLP.gif

Both shots are from Mozilla Suite 1.7, but they look about the
same in FF.

Thanks Tim!! If it works with the regular styles then we're onto a
winner (I'd not changed the large styles one... one step at a time at
the moment).

It seems to be a font-size issue. When I crank the font rather
small (using ctrl+plus and ctrl+minus), the overlap becomes
pretty bad. When I crank the font-size up larger, it seems to
make the problem go away (except for the fact I end up with fonts
that can be read across the room This symptom is worse in FF
than in MozSuite, though I might not have fonts set the same way
(one may have a minimum-allowed font size, while the other may
not, or something like that).

Yeah, the min font size is causing the problems.. the basefont size of
the body is larger than the basefont size of the menu. Hence the min
font size affects the menu first (which means they don't match).

I'll post again when I've updated the main site.

Cheers!!

Tim

 

[sjdevnull]

I've got an old copy of the html and tried to fix the general problem.
It's currently on another website

http://pyyaml.org/downloads/masterhtml/

Works for me, and Large Text style is larger than Basic Page Style for
me as well. FF1.5. Also looks fine in my decrepit old version of
konquerer.

 

[Tim Chase]

I've got an old copy of the html and tried to fix the general problem.
This seems to no longer have the problem and scales nicely no
matter which font-size I use. Good work!

-tim