New Python.org website ?

[Martin Maney]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

> >> http://beta.python.org

> In particular, creating a good-looking design that remains readable in
> all possible browser configurations is impossible. Getting one that is
> readable in all reasonable browser configurations is hard, unless you
> make your definition of "reasonable" very narrow.

Nah, it's very simple, if you can let go of the wrong-headed notion
that the web is just like print media.  Of course that means you're
unlikely to win any design awards, or even get a lot of commecnts about
how spiffy your web site looks, because all the design geeks will judge
you by the inapproriate standards of print media.  You may, however,
get pats on the back from people who actually use the site, and
appreciate a readable, logical layout far more than design school gloss
(and fonts too small to be easily read by many; no, Aahz, IMO your
solution throws out far too much along with the bath water, though I
have to agree that the font size problem vanishes if one uses a
text-mode browser <grin>).

>From a quick look, the beta appears to commit the same error as every
design (as opposed to usability) driven web site in the world: it makes
the running text smaller than the user's default.  It's as if they care
more about how it looks than whether I can read it (as far as I can
tell, that's exactly the case, though it may just be that few are
willing to admit that the designs that they've learned to make, and
that do work well in high-resolution print, just suck on the web where
a high resolution screen is coarser than a bad fax.  bad artists, the
lot of them, who persist in ignoring the characteristics of the medium
they're working in).

It's otherwise nice, and I didn't see any problems with overlapping
texts (in Firefox, etc.) at any halfway reasonable window size, but
perhaps that was corrected already.  The name of the city in Sweden is
mangled in every encoding I've tried - the headline is proper UTF-8,
but the mention in the paragraph is weird.

-- 
In high-resolution print typography, designers enjoy considerable freedom
and control over the articulation of this [font size] range. In
low-resolution screen typography, designers don't.  -- Todd Fahrner