 Yet Another Review Request, and this one won't even tell you how to become rich or pull in the |
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| Peter Evans |
 Aug 15 2007, 08:22 AM
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#1
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Advanced Member  Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13  |
A little site (ten pages, including some near-duplicates) that I've revised is provisionally done.
Here you'll see a hurriedly made website (finished just last week). I was the client, not the marker-upper. The company that made it and I didn't always see eye to eye, but it did dutifully follow some of my own instructions that I now think were, um, sub-optimal. Anyway, it's what I have to work with in a huge rush, and actually it's not at all bad by institutional standards here. My proposed replacement is temporarily here. It's altered (and I hope improved) in a number of ways, but I think all of these pale beside the simple fact that people will no longer need either to reach for a magnifying glass or to zoom the view merely in order to read what's written on it. If I had lots more time I'd do away with a lot of the graphics and upgrade it so that it validates against (X)HTML strict. As far as I know there's not yet any _direct_ real-world advantage of strict over transitional (or indeed of XHTML over HTML), but I've found in the past that it has had a salutory indirect advantage, in forcing me to think hard and thus do things in more efficient ways. But I don't have lots of time. Moreover, I'm told that no matter how good the site is it will be scrapped in December and replaced with something quite different. I hope that the number of people using Netscape 4, MSIE 5 and similar horrors is low, but I realize that I haven't taken precautions on their behalf: I'll change the invocation of CSS to @import url(../common/common.css); and similar. I also haven't got around to cutting some Javascript stuff that never gets used. There's some nonstandard pseudo-CSS for translucency that I really know nothing about but that I cribbed from the mozilla.org developers' site. Hope it's OK. (W3C's CSS "validator" doesn't like it, of course.) Fast comments would be welcome; politeness isn't necessary! This post has been edited by Peter Evans: Aug 15 2007, 08:24 AM |
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| Brian Chandler |
Aug 15 2007, 09:04 AM
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#2
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Jocular coder Group: Members Posts: 2,460 Joined: 31-August 06 Member No.: 43 |
Fell off my chair waiting for the subtitle... pull in the ... what??
Anyway, for the English index page it seems odd that the page title should be in Japanese (script). The text in the image at the top is illegible, but I expect you knew that. The green paragraphs look horrible on this computer (SuSE, Firefox), because they are using a Japanese font - mono-over-spaced, ugly nondescenders, the lot*. This seems to happen on Japanese pages, perhaps because of some combination of the font specification and/or the fact that the text of the page includes Japanese somewhere. Or possibly this, which just seems wrong: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="ja" lang="ja"> * Something of the horrors of Japanese fonts: http://imaginatorium.org/words/descend.htm *** Incidentally, how do you 'do' macrons? Do you have an up-to-date story on this? I am still using circumflex accents everywhere, and at some point I suppose I should change them. |
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 15 2007, 10:05 AM
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#3
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
Pull in the chicks, of course!
Yes, you may remember my name from back in the days of htmlhelp.com/bbs . Back then, there were questions about the free-of-charge (because impoverished) creation of websites imparting secrets guaranteed to make everybody rich (subsequent to an initial payment of $89.95). I go away, I come back, I see the same crapola...... QUOTE(Brian Chandler @ Aug 15 2007, 11:04 PM)  Anyway, for the English index page it seems odd that the page title should be in Japanese (script). Ain't that the truth. That's one of the things I rushed to change. Here and elsewhere in your comment, you suggest that either (a) you've been looking at the old version of the site, before my modest improvements, or (b) I'm going insane. QUOTE The text in the image at the top is illegible, but I expect you knew that. Yes indeedy, and I can't be bothered to change it. (I did remove what appeared to be an antenna emerging from somebody's head, but that's about the limit of my patience with photoshoplifting.) QUOTE The green paragraphs look horrible on this computer (SuSE, Firefox), because they are using a Japanese font - mono-over-spaced, ugly nondescenders, the lot*. OK. Which do you prefer: Bitstream Vera Sans, Deja Vu Sans, something else? Once I know, I'll add it to the relevant "font-family" stuff. QUOTE Incidentally, how do you 'do' macrons? Do you have an up-to-date story on this? I am still using circumflex accents everywhere, and at some point I suppose I should change them. At some point, I hope that Hepburn romanization will die. . . . You may have noticed that I didn't supply macrons for personal names. I shan't bore you with the reasons, but can assure you that this was a conscious decision, not laziness or negligence. I don't quite know what you're asking. The kludge is of course to use character entities; e.g. ampersand-333-semicolon for o-macron. But surely you're not asking that, but rather something like "which editor makes it easy to add macronned characters, e.g. by letting you map Ctrl-Shift-Hyphen plus the following character to that character plus macron? Answer, none that I've bothered to investigate, but I imagine it's a doddle for Xemacs etc. |
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| Brian Chandler |
Aug 15 2007, 10:19 AM
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#4
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Jocular coder Group: Members Posts: 2,460 Joined: 31-August 06 Member No.: 43 |
QUOTE(Peter Evans @ Aug 16 2007, 12:05 AM) Pull in the chicks, of course! Yes, you may remember my name from back in the days of htmlhelp.com/bbs . Back then, there were questions about the free-of-charge (because impoverished) creation of websites imparting secrets guaranteed to make everybody rich (subsequent to an initial payment of $89.95). I go away, I come back, I see the same crapola...... QUOTE(Brian Chandler @ Aug 15 2007, 11:04 PM) Anyway, for the English index page it seems odd that the page title should be in Japanese (script). Ain't that the truth. That's one of the things I rushed to change. Here and elsewhere in your comment, you suggest that either (a) you've been looking at the old version of the site, before my modest improvements, or (b) I'm going insane. Right, one of the two. I see that in fact the problem goes away with your version - which raises my suspicions that in some cases the mere existence of a bit of Japanese text somewhere causes arbitrary and large-scale changes, which seems to me extremely unsatisfactory. But then, I suppose this is the web. I really should decide if I'm going to get rich or just get the chicks... QUOTE QUOTE The text in the image at the top is illegible, but I expect you knew that. Yes indeedy, and I can't be bothered to change it. (I did remove what appeared to be an antenna emerging from somebody's head, but that's about the limit of my patience with photoshoplifting.) QUOTE The green paragraphs look horrible on this computer (SuSE, Firefox), because they are using a Japanese font - mono-over-spaced, ugly nondescenders, the lot*. OK. Which do you prefer: Bitstream Vera Sans, Deja Vu Sans, something else? Once I know, I'll add it to the relevant "font-family" stuff. Well, of course I don't really care. As long as English text doesn't get mangled into a horrible Japanese font. QUOTE QUOTE Incidentally, how do you 'do' macrons? Do you have an up-to-date story on this? I am still using circumflex accents everywhere, and at some point I suppose I should change them. At some point, I hope that Hepburn romanization will die. . . . You may have noticed that I didn't supply macrons for personal names. I shan't bore you with the reasons, but can assure you that this was a conscious decision, not laziness or negligence. I don't quite know what you're asking. The kludge is of course to use character entities; e.g. ampersand-333-semicolon for o-macron. Or simply insert the UTF-8 values. But what I was really asking was whether this "works". I.e. can Joe Q Soap read the macronned letters on his computer the name of the operating system of which he doesn't really know. |
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| Yosemite |
Aug 15 2007, 12:07 PM
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#5
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Group: Members Posts: 7 Joined: 14-August 07 Member No.: 3,561 |
I'm not a techie just a regular person. Other than the itty bitty font that a nearly 50 year old can't read, the layout is pretty nice, easy to follow and fairly clean. Not all junked up with ads and stuff. Colors look good on my monitor. Maybe just pick one accent color for the other pages; either the blue, orange or purple. Again, I'm just an amateur and can only give you an opinion of what looks good to me.
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 15 2007, 06:43 PM
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#6
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE I'm not a techie just a regular person. Ah, so there are at least two of us! The reactions of jus' plain folks are welcome, as the site is likely to be looked at by a proportionate [does this word exist?] number of jus' plain folks. However, I also have other constituencies in mind. One is that of the blind. (I haven't yet dared check whether the Javascript navigation -- which I never asked for, and inherited -- is at all usable.) Blind readers (and readers via Lynx) of the English and indeed Japanese pages would have been mightily surprised by the dozens of instances of alt="空". QUOTE Other than the itty bitty font that a nearly 50 year old can't read, the layout is pretty nice, easy to follow and fairly clean. I hope you're just referring to the itty bitty font in for example the left-hand side of this graphic. The smallest elsewhere is, if I remember right, the 80% (?) font in the translucent drop-down menu at the top right of this and some other pages. (Unless you, like Brian, were looking at the old site.....) QUOTE Not all junked up with ads and stuff. But the whole thing is just one big ad! I suppose what you mean is that it doesn't have animations and similar garbage. Right. I successfully fought against that. QUOTE Maybe just pick one accent color for the other pages; either the blue, orange or purple. Yes. Orange isn't easy to read, and the bits in orange will be easily changed. I'll get around to that some time in the next couple of days. And now for Brian's comments. First, on the Japanese influence on English typography: An earlier version of the site had the Japanese pages in Shift-JIS and specified Shift-JIS in a META tag of every page, whether Japanese or English. I got that changed. But every page still started <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="ja" lang="ja"> I'm not surprised if this screws up display. (What I feared was that it could be sufficient to prompt some message of the order of: This page appears to be in Japanese. Your copy of Windows is not set up for the display of Japanese. Would you like to upgrade Windows now? (I have hazy memories of having once been confronted with such a choice for Korean.) QUOTE I.e. can Joe Q Soap read the macronned letters on his computer the name of the operating system of which he doesn't really know. In a word, yes. Remember, Joe Q Soap runs a newish computer, in part because this is needed in order to run a new version of Windows and any imaginable alternative to a new version of Windows is a security risk (Belorussian hackers would threaten his family jewels). Win2k+ isn't an OS I'd rely on but it's actually pretty good for websurfing. I seldom hear complaints about the unreadability of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia uses UTF-8 for Japanese. I do vaguely remember once finding that MSIE5 or thereabouts refused to display Japanese-language UTF-8 pages (showing blanks instead), until the TITLE text was in character entities (or of course English or whatever) rather than UTF-8; whereupon it would display them perfectly well. I intend to fix the TITLE text of these pages soon. |
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| Peter1968 |
Aug 15 2007, 08:14 PM
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#7
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Serious Coder Group: Members Posts: 448 Joined: 23-September 06 Member No.: 213 |
What can I tell you? I like it - it looks very good. The hoary.org page, that is.
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 15 2007, 09:03 PM
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#8
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE(Peter1968 @ Aug 16 2007, 10:14 AM) What can I tell you? I like it - it looks very good. The hoary.org page, that is. Good grief. (My own comments on websites are much less forgiving.) No, really, if you can think of ways in which I can make it suck less, pray tell. And does what's supposed to be a translucent menu at the top right of three of the five English pages appear as a translucent menu at the top right, and actually work? |
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| Frederiek |
Aug 16 2007, 03:10 AM
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#9
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Programming Fanatic Group: Members Posts: 5,146 Joined: 23-August 06 From: Europe Member No.: 9 |
Yes, the translucent menu works in Safari, but I suppose you already knew that from testing on your own Mac. And probably in other OS/browsers as well, since you use Stu Nicholls' codes. The text of it is effectively a bit small to me (my eyesight starts to let me down at aging), but increasing the font-size with the Safari shortcut remedies that. And the entire page adapts well to that.
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 16 2007, 06:45 AM
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#10
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE(Frederiek @ Aug 16 2007, 05:10 PM) Yes, the translucent menu works in Safari, but I suppose you already knew that from testing on your own Mac. And probably in other OS/browsers as well, since you use Stu Nicholls' codes. Uh . . . no. The original code included some mumbo jumbo with table-related tags within SGML comments that MSIE was supposed to be able to read. I assumed that this was for MSIE <6; and because I didn't understand it, I deleted it. I was wrong. Today I went to an internet cafe and accessed the site using MSIE 6. The "On this page" rectangle sits in the wrong place on the page and isn't activated by the cursor. Grr. Pretty much "out of the box", Nicholls' code would have been excellent for the main menus, which instead use images and Javascript. I did quite a lot of (terrible?) work on one of them in order to get it to do what I wanted it to do. The idea of a simple menu that drops down or otherwise emerges from something that otherwise sits small and inconspicuous in the corner of the viewport seems an obvious one to me. If another site has perfected it, I'd happily, shamelessly steal from that instead. I'd be interested to know if this works with MSIE 7. Or indeed (since I'm temporarily locked out of my office and thus can't use my GNU/Linux machine) whether it works with Konqueror. This post has been edited by Peter Evans: Aug 16 2007, 07:10 AM |
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 16 2007, 11:10 AM
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#11
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
If anyone here has MSIE7, I'd be grateful if they'd take a quick look at this prototype page of mine and tell me if they see a little russet thing at the top right of the viewport that expands into a links menu when the cursor passes over it. This does work with Mozilla and Safari and doesn't work at all with MSIE6.
If it either doesn't work at all with MSIE7 (nothing drops out of it, there's effectively no link), I won't mind so much. If it half-works, I'll probably scrap it. I'll assume for a moment that it either (a) works well with MSIE7 or (b) doesn't work at all with MSIE7. If (a), I'll want to hide it from MSIE<7. If (b), I'll want to hide it from either MSIE<8 or MSIE in general. I've been reading about "conditional comments" at Microsoft and also at a page by Jens Meiert. Although the latter has the title Why conditional comments are bad repeat bad, I'm more swayed by the argument in what's now comment 29 ("February 9, 14:29 CET, Jon Christopher"), which says that they're innocuous. IFF my would-be menu is completely inert and innocuous in MSIE, I'm inclined to "comment in" (for MSIE) a call to an additional, MSIE-specific stylesheet that will render the would-be menu invisible. However, conditional comments are new to me and I may be overlooking some big problem here. |
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| Peter1968 |
Aug 16 2007, 05:37 PM
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#12
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Serious Coder Group: Members Posts: 448 Joined: 23-September 06 Member No.: 213 |
In IE 7.0. the brown menu thing is there, though it's cut off. It also doesn't expand.
In other words, it doesn't work. |
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 16 2007, 06:20 PM
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#13
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE(Peter1968 @ Aug 17 2007, 07:37 AM) In IE 7.0. the brown menu thing is there, though it's cut off. It also doesn't expand. In other words, it doesn't work. Thank you for checking and letting me know. Good, good: then MSIE7 is straightforwardly broken. This makes my life a lot simpler. |
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 17 2007, 01:10 AM
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#14
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
My prototype revision of the little site has just been re-revised.
I'd be particularly grateful for comments from people running MSIE (6 or later), Opera, or Konqueror. (I hope it's safe to assume that nobody uses MSIE <5 or Netscape <5 these days.) Again, this is only my hurried revision of a site made by somebody else, so it perpetrates a lot of things that I'd never do. I don't have the time/energy for a thoroughgoing revision, particularly as the site has a life-expectancy of just four months. But if anything seems bizarre, I want to know about it. |
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| Darin McGrew |
Aug 17 2007, 02:34 AM
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#15
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WDG Member Group: Root Admin Posts: 8,365 Joined: 4-August 06 From: Mountain View, CA Member No.: 3 |
In Opera 9, once I enabled JavaScript and maximized my browser window, I saw the purplish-brown square at the top of the page with the word "PAGE" written on it. The words "ON THIS" were hidden under the main heading.
When I hovered over "PAGE", the options "r courses", "chers", and "ulum" appeared below it. Again, the first part of the tab is hidden under the main heading. When I click on an option, the page scrolls down to the selected section. When the page scrolls down, the menu widget appears in front of the content. Only the heading obscures it. I'm running 1024x768 right now, with about 100px for the scrollbar and Windows taskbar combined. Opera's panels (bookmarks, links, windows, etc.) are turned off. |
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| Frederiek |
Aug 17 2007, 03:40 AM
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#16
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Programming Fanatic Group: Members Posts: 5,146 Joined: 23-August 06 From: Europe Member No.: 9 |
I don't see the translucent box in IE6 (on WinXP through VM on Mac) at all. But, when I go to CSSplay in IE6, both the basic DD menu you used and the position:fixed; (fixed) layout sample work. You need a combination of them both, which I thought you already used, but apparently not.
You might want to read up on conditional comments and hacks. |
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 17 2007, 04:23 AM
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#17
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE(Darin McGrew @ Aug 17 2007, 04:34 PM) In Opera 9, once I enabled JavaScript and maximized my browser window, I saw the purplish-brown square at the top of the page with the word "PAGE" written on it. The words "ON THIS" were hidden under the main heading. . . . Oh dear. I think I should download and install Opera. (Not something I want to do till Monday: till then, I'll be connected via modem.) In the meantime: I suppose that these problems should be fixable if I use z-index to specify that the menu goes on top of anything else. I'll try that. QUOTE(Frederiek @ Aug 17 2007, 05:40 PM) I don't see the translucent box in IE6 (on WinXP through VM on Mac) at all. Good! QUOTE(Frederiek @ Aug 17 2007, 05:40 PM) But, when I go to CSSplay in IE6, both the basic DD menu you used and the position:fixed; (fixed) layout sample work. You need a combination of them both, which I thought you already used, but apparently not. No. I used the former, but had no idea what the conditional comment stuff was about (I've since read up on this) and also was appalled by the notion of providing two different ways of doing the same thing, one for everything other than MSIE and the other for MSIE. I guessed that an MSIE-only version would end up not working on this or that version of MSIE. (Indeed, I think the page said it wouldn't work on MSIE5Mac.) I'm not under any obligation to provide this supplementary menu, so I think of it as a convenient bonus for those who can see it. I didn't use the latter (because I didn't notice its existence), and instead cobbled together a top-right-and-translucent solution (or not!) all by myself. QUOTE(Frederiek @ Aug 17 2007, 05:40 PM) You might want to read up on conditional comments and hacks. Unless absolutely necessary, no I wouldn't. Most of these tricks hide stuff from very old browsers (easily done) or hide it from this or that version of MSIE (and I've hidden it from all since MSIE5Win) or look very dicy. And when reading this kind of material, I always worry that I should be searching for other pages that qualify what it says, or point out fatal side-effects. |
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 17 2007, 08:18 AM
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#18
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE(Peter Evans @ Aug 17 2007, 06:23 PM) QUOTE(Darin McGrew @ Aug 17 2007, 04:34 PM) In Opera 9, once I enabled JavaScript and maximized my browser window, I saw the purplish-brown square at the top of the page with the word "PAGE" written on it. The words "ON THIS" were hidden under the main heading. . . . Oh dear. I think I should download and install Opera. (Not something I want to do till Monday: till then, I'll be connected via modem.) In the meantime: I suppose that these problems should be fixable if I use z-index to specify that the menu goes on top of anything else. I'll try that. Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets 2.0, so lucid elsewhere, makes little sense when it comes to z-index. I was therefore reduced to tossing in "z-index:100" here and there and hoping for the best. This doesn't seem to have affected Firefox or Safari (where there was anyway no obvious problem]. How about Opera -- is the little menu mucked up as badly as before? |
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| Darin McGrew |
Aug 17 2007, 11:45 AM
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#19
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WDG Member Group: Root Admin Posts: 8,365 Joined: 4-August 06 From: Mountain View, CA Member No.: 3 |
I didn't notice any difference. The header still obscures the menu, but the header sits in front of the body content.
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| Peter Evans |
Aug 18 2007, 06:09 AM
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#20
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Advanced Member Group: Members Posts: 109 Joined: 24-August 06 Member No.: 13 |
QUOTE(Darin McGrew @ Aug 18 2007, 01:45 AM) I didn't notice any difference. The header still obscures the menu, but the header sits in front of the body content. I downloaded and installed Opera (and if nobody here compliments me for this, the phone company should), and looked around. Got it. The latest version of Opera doesn't think that a z-index of 100 is greater than a z-index of 1. But a little experimenting showed me that it does concede that a z-index of 100 is greater than one of 0. I therefore changed "1" to "0". My little prototype site now appears to work with the latest (as of just a few hours ago) version of Opera. Previous versions of Opera? Gods know. I hope that people sufficiently on the ball to be using Opera will either (a) be using a recent version of Opera or (b) will have another good browser and won't mind switching to it. I then had a certain attack of conscience over having hidden the menu from MSIE. I thought I'd instead present it, in a straightforward way. After all, an unattractive and not-so-convenient menu is better than no menu. So I rewrote the stylesheet that was MSIE-only (thanks to the Microsoft-proprietary "conditional comments" kludge). Instead of hiding the little menu, I got it do display it. Well, it displayed the menu. It also screwed up a lot of other things. I tentatively infer that MSIE 5.5 (the only version I have here) sometimes or often interprets selector1 selector2 {property: value} to mean selector1, selector2 {property: value} or similar. Ugh. I'd hope that MS has since fixed this. I've therefore tentatively made two MSIE-only stylesheets: (a) a "hide the little menu" stylesheet for MSIE < 6 (b) a "present the little menu straightforwardly and boringly" stylesheet for MSIE ≥ 6 So far, I've added this distinction to just one of the pages: this one. I'd be grateful if any user of MSIE 6 or 7 would take a look at that page. Does the page look OK? Is the heading "A few of our courses" (near the top) in green or in black, and is the body copy in a regular or reduced size? If you see a menu of the items within the page, is it easy to read? I may have to change the dividing point from 6 to 7, or even to 8. |
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