[Python-Dev] Playing with a new theme for the docs

[Cameron Simpson]

On 20Mar2012 15:45, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
| Nice and clean, but looks too similar to newer Google properties...
| Also I see that (like Google) you're falling for the fallacy of using
| less contrast. From an accessibility perspective that's questionable
| -- and I don't mean the legally blind, just people like myself whose
| eyes are getting a bit older. This also means I don't particularly
| like adding background color (no matter how light) to text samples.

Conversely, I like the text samples slightly shaded; I find a bare rectangle
on the perimeter of a DIV just a tad more like noise, whereas a very slightly
shaded block makes it very clear to me.

I know it is a PITA, but how hard is it to make a tiny tiny CSS control
block somewhere so a user can tune the style in coarse ways (i.e. tweak
the properties of the class for shaded blocks)?

I think the font choice in the new style is better; cleaner, less noisy,
like a sans serif font versus a serifed font. So much so that I
thought the new style used annoyingly more whitespace, but putting them
side by side shows the new style to be more compact. Win win!

One thing that bothers me about both styles is the fixed width text
versus proportional size difference. Let me say in advance that I'm
viewing both in Firefox on a Mac. To take an example, in the argparse
module the opening sentence says "The argparse module". For me the word
"argparse" is distinctly shorter in vertical height, which is a bit
jarring. (the difference is smaller in the new style.) Is there a way
to specify fonts that keeps this height attribute the same?

Example screen shots (just those three words):
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2607515/screenshots/argparse-new1.png
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2607515/screenshots/argparse-old1.png

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

That's just the sort of bloody stupid name they would choose.
        - Reginald Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire