On Jun 13, 2006, at 5:00 PM, John G. wrote:
I thought that if folks had the various source files, then it would be
easier for contributors to make small tweaks (including technical or
spelling/grammar corrections) and then patches. I’d be more inclined
to send a patch containing a few small fixes to one file, rather than
copying/pasting html from my browser into an email message. That makes
more work for everyone, IMO.
Unfortunately, a patch isn’t too helpful to us either, since we have
to go into the software to fix it. We’ll see if we can brainstorm
some solutions here once we get the site up. That’s priority one,
for now.
For example, the “About” page. The 2nd paragraph could possibly use
some re-wording as well as a link to a page containing the text of the
Ruby license. There might also be small corrections further down the
page that someone might want to make (like fixing the quoting around
the “variable declarations” bullet item).
I’ll look at all of these. Thank you.
James Edward G. II
On Jun 13, 2006, at 6:21 PM, Yukihiro M. wrote:
Ruby is Ruby even in the Japanese text. You can write the red jewel
name in Katakana, but we don’t consider it as a language name.
Thanks Matz, for the insight and for not-the-red-jewel-Ruby!
Gary W.
Hi,
In message “Re: ruby-lang.org redesign?”
on Wed, 14 Jun 2006 05:05:57 +0900, [email protected] writes:
|I was looking at the Japanese version of the site and
|noticed that ‘Ruby’ appeared in Latin script in the middle
|of the Japanese script. I was just curious as to what
|convention leads to that occurrence. I would have expected
|there to be a Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana character for ‘ruby’
|(based on my 30 second reading of the Wikipedia entry for Japanese
|Writing System).
Ruby is Ruby even in the Japanese text. You can write the red jewel
name in Katakana, but we don’t consider it as a language name.
matz.
On Jun 20, 2006, at 9:12 AM, Michal S. wrote:
You can at least apply the color corrections.
Thank you for the feedback. I’ve forwarded your issues to the style
designer for the site. We will look into them.
James Edward G. II
On 6/13/06, James Edward G. II [email protected] wrote:
James, can you provide a link to where possible contributors might
grab the site source via anon cvs/svn?
Hmm. The site is in a database and served up by the Radiant CMS.
What specifically are you after? We’ll consider providing reasonable
access post launch, if we can easily and safely do so…
Well, the site is not exactly friendly to people who might want to
save it and edit the stylesheets.
The stylesheets are referenced with absolute URLs so the page does not
work without modifications. So are images.
There is also a bug in the page as it is. It does not define
background for all elements that have background-image. This means
that without the images the page is hardly readable.
When I tried to change the CSS to relative witdhts instead of pixel
widths I found that there are places where modification to CSS alone
is not sufficient.
The search uses an anonymous (unnamed) table that contains the field
and the button. With CSS alone it would be quite hard to specify
anything for that.
The code snippet has fixed size borders that produce the rounded
edges. These borders do not play nice with expanding/contracting of
the page. I did not look much into this but I guess that yet another
wrapper div may be needed to format it properly.
I am not sure it is of any use but here is the modified stylesheet.
You can at least apply the color corrections.
Thanks
Michal
Michal S. wrote:
Well, the site is not exactly friendly to people who might want to
save it and edit the stylesheets.
…
Michal. I appreciate your interest in the Ruby-Lang design.
I don’t think now is the time to address the issues you have raised. Not
that you aren’t raising valid points. There are things that I would like
to change about the design myself, but we are really working hard to get
this out the door. Please understand that the people working on the site
have already invested many, many hours into it. I’ve personally invested
hundreds of hours into the site (on both the design and programming).
One of the things I’ve learned while working on this project is that
there are often several valid ways of looking at a design. There are
people who prefer a clean simplistic design. Others prefer subtle
gradients, shinny buttons, and a fixed-width design. It’s not so much a
question of right or wrong. It’s a question of personal taste.
My personal goal for the Ruby site was to give it a fresh and attractive
look that was as elegant as the Ruby language is itself. In some ways
the new design has exceeded my expectations. In other ways I know it can
be better. It is a work in progress.
For the record we went through about 20 different variations on the
Ruby-Lang design, presented a selection of those to the community, and
finally decided on the current design.
Some of that was chronicled here:
http://redhanded.hobix.com/redesign2005/
On 6/20/06, John W. Long [email protected] wrote:
Michal S. wrote:
Well, the site is not exactly friendly to people who might want to
save it and edit the stylesheets.
…
Michal. I appreciate your interest in the Ruby-Lang design.
Hmm, in the current style the text on the web pages starts way too
early below the bottom of the blue stripe. I would think that one or
two lines of space there would make it look much better. Perhaps also
removing some space below the title inside the blue stripe.
And I would be a bit put off by the navigation section. I do not like
marketing speak, and links section where two captions out of three
contain an exclamation mark is not something I like to read.
The explanations in link section titles and the Participate link
section only add clutter and no value (except for the explanation of
ruby core which is the only non-obvious link). And they do sound much
like marketing flyer which is annoying to read for me.
Thanks
Michal
On 6/21/06, Michal S. [email protected] wrote:
Hmm, in the current style the text on the web pages starts way too
like marketing flyer which is annoying to read for me.
I hate to reply to myself …
But I forgot that the links section also contains a link “Success
stories”. Yet another term I learned to dislike. I think something
along the lines “What is ruby used for” would be as clear and much
less repelling.
Thanks
Michal
Michal S. wrote:
Hmm, in the current style the text on the web pages starts way too
early below the bottom of the blue stripe. I would think that one or
two lines of space there would make it look much better. Perhaps also
removing some space below the title inside the blue stripe.
There is still some work to be done on the remaining style issues. IE
displays the site as it should be, but I haven’t gotten around to fixing
it for Firefox and Safari.
On 6/20/06, John W. Long [email protected] wrote:
to change about the design myself, but we are really working hard to get
this out the door. Please understand that the people working on the site
have already invested many, many hours into it. I’ve personally invested
hundreds of hours into the site (on both the design and programming).
Maybe it is not the time now but technical problems of the visual
design should be addressed before the site is launched.
I appreciate your work on the new design. Since it is supposed to be
based on cms that can apply different templates it should be possible
to change the visual design easily.
However, only your team has access to the templates so there is not
much else for me to do but complain. My email was partly in reply to
the question by James what would be access to the templates good for.
Here I would like to point out that access to the site is not much
help for developing alternate templates without access to the actual
templates.
Even if you are not ready to accept the templates now developing a
proper usable template (as opposed to a quick CSS hack) takes time. If
you make the current content accessible when you are ready to accept
modifications you will have to wait some time before you get any I
guess.
One of the things I’ve learned while working on this project is that
there are often several valid ways of looking at a design. There are
people who prefer a clean simplistic design. Others prefer subtle
gradients, shinny buttons, and a fixed-width design. It’s not so much a
question of right or wrong. It’s a question of personal taste.
Certainly. One design cannot satisfy everybody because different
people have different tastes. And use different hardware to view the
site which may affect how they percieve color contrasts, etc.
I think the new design is more conservative that the current red only
design and would be easier for newcomers. It also provides sufficient
contrast for the text to be visible (when the images are present). It
does not make the text stand out too much to be comfortable to read
like those bright white on black sites do.
However, technical issues are not a matter of taste. And since the
screens today are far from the same size making the site fixed size
does look like a technical issue to me.
Thanks
Michal
Michal S. wrote:
However, technical issues are not a matter of taste. And since the
screens today are far from the same size making the site fixed size
does look like a technical issue to me.
Agreed that technical issues are important to work out. Fixed-width
isn’t a technical issue though. It’s intentional and not uncommon.
The debate is over whether the designer should take the liberty to force
the text to wrap after a certain point. In print, it is really important
to make the lines wrap at a certain width because it improves
readability (as do margins and other layout techniques). It’s a little
different on the Web because we have the ability to dynamically reflow
the page whenever we want. Some people have made the assertion that Web
pages that don’t force you into a certain width are more usable. For the
most part, I’d agree that it is nice when you can resize the Web page to
taste. But you must also understand that in giving the user that freedom
you sacrifice the amount of creativity you can have with the design
itself. You can’t easily have images that go from margin to margin (as
images don’t normally resize on the Web), fancy borders are also much
harder to pull off, etc…
At some point someone had to make a decision about this and we did: we
chose fixed-width for this design. Perhaps the next one will be
different.
On Jun 21, 2006, at 8:27 AM, John W. Long wrote:
There is still some work to be done on the remaining style issues.
IE displays the site as it should be, but I haven’t gotten around
to fixing it for Firefox and Safari.
Ugh. Was a sad commentary on the ‘success’ of standardized markup
languages.
On Jun 21, 2006, at 7:05 AM, Michal S. wrote:
stories". Yet another term I learned to dislike. I think something
along the lines “What is ruby used for” would be as clear and much
less repelling.
I’m all for this concept of everyone contributing feedback. But
rather than pick apart the site verbally, why not offer up fixes to
their HTML or copy that would make it look better?
It’s obvious that people worked hard on this design and it’s a shame
to tear it apart like this without offering constructive advice.
Keep up the good work guys!
-Mat
On 6/21/06, John W. Long [email protected] wrote:
The debate is over whether the designer should take the liberty to force
the text to wrap after a certain point. In print, it is really important
to make the lines wrap at a certain width because it improves
readability (as do margins and other layout techniques). It’s a little
To make the layout more readable like it is done in the print one would
have to
specify the page size in font size units such as em or x. Pixels have
nothing to do with text layout.
different on the Web because we have the ability to dynamically reflow
the page whenever we want. Some people have made the assertion that Web
pages that don’t force you into a certain width are more usable. For the
most part, I’d agree that it is nice when you can resize the Web page to
taste. But you must also understand that in giving the user that freedom
you sacrifice the amount of creativity you can have with the design
itself. You can’t easily have images that go from margin to margin (as
images don’t normally resize on the Web), fancy borders are also much
harder to pull off, etc…
I do not see any images from side to side (but it might be because I
do not see any images at all). If you refer to the gradients it should
be possible to align them so that the gradient appears at the right
place even if it is not from side to side.
Alternatively, browsers can scale bitmaps at the cost of somewhat
blurring them. But blurring is not of much importance for gradients I
guess.
And yes, I would gladly trade a single fancy border, even several
fancy borders for a site that displays as much stuff as possible when
fullscreen yet shrinks to fit into half of the screen when I want to
put another window next to it.
At some point someone had to make a decision about this and we did: we
chose fixed-width for this design. Perhaps the next one will be different.
Is “the next one” referring to some new design that is probably going
to happen in several years or is there a plan for alternate templates?
Thanks
Michal
On 6/21/06, John W. Long [email protected] wrote:
Michal S. wrote:
Hmm, in the current style the text on the web pages starts way too
early below the bottom of the blue stripe. I would think that one or
two lines of space there would make it look much better. Perhaps also
removing some space below the title inside the blue stripe.
There is still some work to be done on the remaining style issues. IE
displays the site as it should be, but I haven’t gotten around to fixing
it for Firefox and Safari.
Actually, the issue Michal is pointing out here is one that still
exists, even in IE. You can see the effect if you open the “Ruby in
Twenty Minutes” page. In either Firefox or IE you can see that the
body of the page (starting “Open up IRB. If you’re using Mac OS X…”)
is right up next to the blue bar. I mentioned this problem a while
back in an email to James. I’ll copy it here:
On 5/23/06, Jacob F. [email protected] wrote:
Great work! Suggestion: looks like you could use a margin-bottom of
10px or so on the #head-wrapper-1 rule in high.css; without that, I
get the “Ruby in Google Summer of Code” headline mashed right up
against the code snippet.
I’ve tested that addition in both Firefox and IE and it seems to do as
Michal was suggesting, adding an amount of whitespace between the blue
title bar and the remaining content. You could probably just as easily
use a em or ex based value, but my original suggestion was in pixels
since the rest of the layout is pixel dependent.
Jacob F.
James Edward G. II wrote:
On Jun 21, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Michal S. wrote:
And yes, I would gladly trade a single fancy border, even several
fancy borders for a site that displays as much stuff as possible when
fullscreen yet shrinks to fit into half of the screen when I want to
put another window next to it.
We have made note of all your complaints. We appreciate you sending
them in.
BTW, is the home-page redesign project mailing list still active?
Not to encourage endless debate over an impending design update (people
will do that without any prodding anyway), but perhaps that’s a better
place to voice concern or suggestions.
On a side note, I’ve found a very handy solution for displeasing site
design and behavior: Greasemonkey. I bet Mousehole would work just as
well.
Remember, once something has reached your browser, it’s fair game for
local manipulation.
(Please direct JavaScript flaming to /dev/null)
–
James B.
“In Ruby, no one cares who your parents were, all they care
about is if you know what you are talking about.”
On Jun 21, 2006, at 1:07 PM, James B. wrote:
BTW, is the home-page redesign project mailing list still active?
We have an active, but private mailing list.
Not to encourage endless debate over an impending design update
(people will do that without any prodding anyway), but perhaps
that’s a better place to voice concern or suggestions.
People are welcome to post about them here or email me directly. I’m
listening and I’ll get the concerns to the right place.
James Edward G. II
Jacob F. wrote:
Actually, the issue Michal is pointing out here is one that still
exists, even in IE. You can see the effect if you open the “Ruby in
Twenty Minutes” page. In either Firefox or IE you can see that the
body of the page (starting “Open up IRB. If you’re using Mac OS X…”)
is right up next to the blue bar. I mentioned this problem a while
back in an email to James. I’ll copy it here:
Ok, thanks for bringing that up. I’ll look into it.
On Jun 21, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Michal S. wrote:
And yes, I would gladly trade a single fancy border, even several
fancy borders for a site that displays as much stuff as possible when
fullscreen yet shrinks to fit into half of the screen when I want to
put another window next to it.
We have made note of all your complaints. We appreciate you sending
them in.
Just to be clear, the site design has been selected. There seems to
be a good deal of support for the design. It is clear to us that
some don’t like it, but we’re pretty confident that those people
represent a minority (judging from all the remarks we have seen).
There are many reasons for us to migrate to the new site. Please
remember that it is backed by a CMS, so it will make our job, as
maintainers, much easier. That’s important. It means we are better
equipped to handle these and future complaints because we can easily
redo to look of the entire site down the road.
We are currently pushing full steam towards a launch. We’re trying
to get the content generated for the last section now. When that’s
in place, we’ll give the community a chance to crawl the site and
point out lingering problems. From there, we will OK the launch.
Again, it’s not that we don’t care about what you have to say. Of
course we want the Ruby community to like the Ruby home page. We
believe a majority of users do prefer the new design and we look
forward to increasing those numbers with future post launch changes.
Thank you.
James Edward G. II
James Edward G. II wrote:
On Jun 21, 2006, at 1:07 PM, James B. wrote:
BTW, is the home-page redesign project mailing list still active?
We have an active, but private mailing list.
Actually, we did have one a long time ago that was open to anyone,
perhaps we should move this discussion there?
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/vit-discuss