This is why I called it a "comp" - I'm not going to waste my time with "real" HTML, CSS, etc. if you aren't going to like it...which you have made abundantly clear.
I simply created it as a springboard for discussion, and not as a beta of any kind.
That was 30 minutes work, not 30 hours.
- Mark
-----Original Message----- From: twisted-python-admin@twistedmatrix.com [mailto:twisted-python-admin@twistedmatrix.com] On Behalf Of Glyph Lefkowitz Sent: Saturday, August 24, 2002 6:13 PM To: twisted-python@twistedmatrix.com; mark@markrichman.com Subject: Re: [Twisted-Python] Proposed Website Comp
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On Sat, 24 Aug 2002 12:29:17 -0400, "Mark A. Richman" mark@markrichman.com wrote:
Please let me know what you think.
Mark,
Thanks for your contribution. Before I get into any critique I really want to stress that we need the aid of Real Designers (using Real Designer tools like Fireworks and Dreamweaver)... AND our website is in need of some design help in order to get a flashier, more marketing-licious appearance for the stuff that executives are going to read. Also that I'm glad you contributed something and I hope you're going to keep working on it :).
However, the site you submitted represents almost everything I hate about "modern" web design. Aesthetically, it's not too unappealing (I like bright primary colors, I like grid backgrounds, and I like the sorts of sans-serif fonts you've chosen for screen reading.) Technically, the design has all kinds of problems, though.
* You're using antialiased text images rather than fonts. If I really want my fonts antialiased that badly, I'd use MacOS X, or Windows XP, or configure xft to do it in my browser. You make the site immediately unusable to text-mode and sight-impaired browsers by doing this. Keep in mind that Twisted's first major application was for a radio station for the sight-impaired.
* You're using a javascript menu to save space in the masthead, but the masthead is just as large (or larger, depending on font sizes) than the original navigation control. The javascript menu likely won't work in any browser without a bug-for-bug compatibility with IE or Mozilla, rendering the menu text unusable in a wide variety of browsers. Twisted is popular with open-source developers who will quite often use alternative browsers in order to either test their apps or because they're simply rebellious :)
* You're using tables for all formatting, rather than CSS. This is a notorious error that most experienced web designers seem to shudder at. I guess this is the way that Macromedia's product will do the site by default -- CSS will be ignored by older and alternative browsers, but tables will often simply be rendered incorrectly by them.
* Your images (thanks to table-based formatting) are split up into ridiculously small chunks. This will make the site unpleasant to version-control because every design change will come with 12 new images and 8 old ones deleted.
* There appears to be Javascript in here to popup an ad window. WTF!?!!?!!?!
* The page is highly unfriendly to indexing. With no text, lots of autogenerated filenames, split images, and no keywords, there's no way Google is going to find anything of value here.
I could go on, but I think you're getting the gist here.
In other words, Twisted's whole raison d'etre is *integration*, which relies upon adherence not only to the letter but the spirit of protocol definitions and file formats. Yes, it's possible to get browsers to do some neat tricks with Javascript (I am actually considering the purchase of a Javascript book right now) -- but javascript is for *applications*, not menu formatting. Yes, it's possible to get human-readble text formatted by constructing giant tables with one pixel per row. Nevertheless, this greatly reduces the utility of the website to anyone who is not using *exactly* the platform that you are using to view it, and that "platform" is up to and including "the human eye". Many non-humans (googlebot, dmoz, various link checkers) will want to read the site, as well as some people who cannot see, or cannot see well.
So use technologies like CSS and XML and Python and even XSLT or whatever to make the site as appealing as possible, but keep the presentation separate from the content of the site. That content includes navigational elements as well as text -- that's the whole point of "hypertext", after all. PageRank would not work with gopher or ftp :)