Re: The current disscusion is good, but...

[Steve Fox <drfickle k-lug com>]

Joakim Ziegler wrote:
> Main issues to consider:
> 
>   * What information goes in? We should have a sizable list. I'm assuming
>     a lot of the information on the current sites should go into the new
>     ones, but there might also be new things.

I'm guessing we'll divide it into sections of interest: Users,
Developers, Foundation, Office ??

I think that Gnotices is an extremely important part of the website and
I'd like to see that redone in something other than Zope. Speaking of
Gnotices, is it going to be internationalized too? The news type of
sites seem to lend themselves to databases, but I think most people
agreed that databases are bad for i18n sites. The rest of the site which
will be fairly static should probably follow the flat file / gettext
solution.
 
>   * How is the information to be accessible? A lot of the things we have are
>     just basic pages, and that's fine, but there are also things that should
>     be searchable, viewable by different access methods/sorting orders, etc.

I think a decent search is very important. I'll leave the navigational
methods to be decided by designers more talented than I.
 
>   * What are the requirements on the navigational structure and page
>     design/layout? This includes both usability, aestetical and browser
>     compatibility issues.

I think most people want to support a wide variety of browsers. In all
honesty this practically eliminates the useage of CSS since the most
popular browsers are quite broken with regards to this. I'm especially
thinking of the fact that turning off Javascript in Netscape mistakenly
turns on CSS as well. A year from now when Mozilla is more popular maybe
we could reconsider it then? If we decide to use CSS we need to be very
careful to make sure the site still looks decent with CSS support turned
off.
 
>   * Policies for content creation tools. This wouldn't be important in most
>     projects, but it is in this case. Basically, there should be a policy on
>     what goes into the site, when it comes to licensing, etc. For instance,
>     the current www.gnome.org site uses Adobe Garamond Condensed for menus,
>     which is a commercially licensed font. I've used my licensed copy of this
>     font to create the images, but people still reacted to this. In
>     retrospect, I think this was a bad decision on my part. On the other
>     hand, I think it should be acceptable for people to use tools of their
>     choice to create graphics, etc. (So I won't be prevented from using my
>     favourite graphics tools, which happen to be proprietary).

I'd strongly recommend not using text images...especially if they
require commercial fonts. The main reason for this being i18n. It would
be a pain to keep having to match images exactly with all the various
languages. I also recommend we do not use GIF files but rather PNG. I
don't think it matters what tools are used to create them, but staying
away from formats with nasty copyrights is a good idea. I'd like to see
some coding standards as well. Even if I don't like the way that's
chosen I think it'd be nice to have some consistency. We don't need to
be nazis about it, but at least try to keep things clean.

-- 

Steve Fox
http://k-lug.com