OpenBSD Journal

Do you like the new layout?

Contributed by mk/reverse on from the paul-weissman's-modern-web-technologies dept.

Yes 74.9% (492 votes)


No 13.9% (91 votes)


Yes and no (please comment) 11.3% (74 votes)


Total votes: 657

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By almeida (66.31.180.15) on

    I always in favor of CSS, so I'm glad you guys are moving in that direction.

    The indentation of comments in expanded mode could probably be a little bigger. Right now the indentation is a big too subtle.

    The pages look kind of bland without the story icons.

    Other than that, good work.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (203.100.224.50) on

      it looks a lot crisper, generally nice. does need the story icons back though.

    2. By Mark Patterson (210.49.86.89) on

      It looks nice. But there are a number of people adding comments like this: 明仁 梅雨前線
      Since I can't read unicode from numbers, being only a lesser geek-aspirant, to see what the author intended, I fired up my editor (TextMate), started a new html 4.01 transitional, and did a browse window on. Why not just use utf-8 on undeadly and show the characters as nature intended?

  2. By indeed (81.204.188.152) on

    its ok, but the font...mmm...would rather stick to the current one

    Comments
    1. By Simon (217.157.132.75) on

      Agreeed, the fonts are to small. The new font looks nicer, on my box at least, but they are way to small.

      The "Comments", "Flat" and "Expanded" seems out of place. They shouldn't, because they are placed similar in the new and old layout, I think maybe it's because the font is the same as the one used for links in the news items. The same goes for the "Show thread", "Reply to this comment", "Mod Up" and "Mod Down", they look misplaced. The threading of comments looks weird again, it shouldn't, because it hasn't really changed.

      Making layout for websites i an ungrateful job, people will always complain. Really I find that the worst thing you can do is starting to define fonts, it will never look the same on every system. Just drop all the font stuff.

  3. By The Hyphen (68.125.83.160) on

    The Hypens used to make lines, in turn used to create a square around the comments options, is ugly. Take that off the copyright notice at the bottom of the page as well.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (222.153.86.102) on

      I'm with the parent. I like it in general, but hate the dashed line borders.

      Comments
      1. By djm@ (203.217.30.86) on

        I generally like it, but agree that expanded mode needs more indentation and the dashed boxes are ugly :) Maybe the font size is a tiny bit small too.

        Comments
        1. By another Rob (212.84.101.88) on

          I agree with these posts (and with the people who say put the cute images back) in addition:

          * the navigation links beneath comments are too intrusive (font size is too large, and those dashed lines...) I liked the old ones

          * the grey bar at the top of every page which contains the "search" box needs to be taller to fit in the search box (or move the search box back to where it was, it was fine...)

          * the vote counter / display (top of this page) is broken in so many ways (too wide, histogram not displayed correctly, border box looks silly)

          * we need an "older stuff" pane on the sidebar of the front page and more padding at the top of this sidebar

          Thanks for all the hard work you're putting into this, I look forward to seeing the final product!

  4. By knitti (217.232.126.147) on

    I like css layouts out of principle, and also aesthetically this one is o.k., but it is rather broken in Opera 8. I know, each browser has it's very own implementation bugs, I just wanted it mentioned. Designing pages to look not broken in each of MSIE, Firefox and Opera is already very hard work. Not to mention Safari, Konqueror or such crude things as MSIE for Mac. So it's completely understandable, if no one takes the time to fix this (and I won't neither)

    Comments
    1. By knitti (213.54.208.197) on

      it is much better now

  5. By PC (70.25.45.46) pcronin@bigfoot.com.no.spam.org.net.info on

    I like quite a bit of it, the only thing I don't really like is the lack of images... I like the cute images per topic...

  6. By Anonymous Coward (68.145.103.21) on

    I honestly hadn't noticed...

    Comments
    1. By Nate (65.94.63.159) on

      Nor had I.

  7. By m0rf (68.104.57.241) on

    yes i like it, but i think the section icons should be incorporated into the new look (perhaps new icons?) with a div with a class like "hardware-icon", "news-icons", etc and background-image instead of img tags.

    perhaps add multiple stylesheets, some with more colour than the default grey on white.

  8. By jtorin (217.215.193.248) on

    I would like some more padding in a few places, eg. above and under the text in the headers for stories and comments. Add a few pixels and I'm happy.

  9. By Anonymous Coward (69.158.152.193) on

    I like it but I have a really small request. Any chance of removing the dotted border around some of the text items? Like in the main page, around the comment details. And then once you click on the comments there are mor dotted borders around all the comment options to reply, mod up or down and so on. Other than that awesome work!!

  10. By Todd T. Fries (66.210.106.26) todd@fries.net on

    I like the look, the fonts are smaller in konqueror, nice!

    The outline around the '30 comments : reply : flattened' looks rather out of place to my eyes, and strange.

  11. By mirabile (213.196.226.36) on

    The CSS layout looks like a major regression in Lynx.

  12. By 0handle (62.178.198.28) on

    I am always in favor of css .... but the new layout doesn't look that good
    in some browsers... (Safari etc.)

  13. By Anonymous Coward (82.217.223.198) on

    I think there are too much dotted borders. And I think it's better to use definition lists for the OpenBSD Errata and the OpenBSD VuXML sideboxes instead of tables.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (82.217.223.198) on

      And also I would use <h4> in the contribution class, and a <p> for the commentbody class.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (212.202.37.43) on

        h4 for the the contribution class would be senseless as this is definately _not_ a heading. the problem w/ the

        -articlebody is that this would make it quite hard to use more

        s in the articlebody, let alone

        s and stuff.
        
        

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (82.217.223.198) on

          Yes h4 would be senseless if you use Firefox, but it would look better in screen readers. Another thing to make the site look better in screen readers is to add <hr style="display:none"> between the stories and comments.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (212.202.37.43) on

            it is semanticaly senseless to use <h4>s for those, as these are just not headings

            what use are <hr>s for screenreaders?

    2. By Anonymous Coward (212.202.37.43) on

      why should the errata and vuxml be <dl>s? these just are not definition lists, i think tables are semantically the best fit.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (82.217.223.198) on

        Definition lists looks better in screenreaders than tables IMO. Example

  14. By emagius (216.41.83.206) magius_eternal@yahoo.com on

    Perhaps it looks wonderful in graphical browsers, but the layout is not so hot in [e]links, where there's no indentation for thread replies and links (show thread, reply, mod up/down) are placed in columns instead of in rows. The colors don't look quite as nice as they did with the old layout, either, but that might just be a limitation of the browser's 16-color display.

  15. By Anonymous Coward (24.166.34.147) on

    It's not too bad, but there are some issues with it; namely, the code semantics aren't all that hot, as it appears tables are still being used. The threaded discussions would look much better on non-CSS-aware browsers if an unordered list rather than a table were used to show them. CSS is good, but its purpose is defeated if the code it's applied to isn't well-structured.

    Another issue is that the front page seems to stretch for me under Gecko, but I'm not sure yet whether or not that's just a fluke. On the whole, the style looks nice.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (212.202.37.43) on

      threaded comments are done with tables? where?

      and where else are tables used where they should not?

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (24.166.34.147) on

        My mistake. I was looking at the old source by mistake. The newer layout is coded somewhat better, but using divs rather than tables still presents the same problem, if not a worse one--tables at least provide default styling that can be understood on even the oldest browsers, whereas with divs, in the absence of style sheets they're unstructured blocks. As I mentioned, a much better solution would be to represent comments as items in an unordered list:

        <ul class="discussion">
          <li>
            <h3>Title!</h3>
            <div class="blockinfo">
              Contributor information!
            </div>
            <div class="body">
              Content!
            </div>
            <ul class="replies">
              <li>
                <a>Re: Title!</a> <span class="info">Contributor information!</span>
              </li>
            </ul>
          </li>
        </ul>

        This would be even easier to style than the indented-div scheme employed in the new style, and in the absence of CSS support, it would still look acceptable.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (212.202.37.43) on

          the problem w/ that approach is this is not easy to do w/ the current codebase, to have many layers of nested comments, ie the cgi has to take care to open and close <ul>s for each layer of indent.

          i see what you're proposing but is not totally clear to me yet how to do this w/ the current cgi and templates.

          i'll see

  16. By Anonymous Coward (68.250.26.213) on

    -add a little color
    -increase the indentation a little
    -maybe pick a slightly bolder/larger font

    All small nits... I like it regardless. Great work!

  17. By Jean (140.226.4.3) on

    If you are going to make changes, how about an option that says: Highlight messages newer than [1, 2,3] days. Everything gets a slightly greyed out background, new messages stand out. I keep coming back nearly every day, but don't always know if some pithy comment has been added to an older topic.

    Who could believe that it has come so be such a mainstay in just a short year? Great work!

  18. By Ray (80.186.43.137) on

    The new layout is ok as such, but the hyperlink underlining of the topics make them look stuffy-sortish in Firefox =(

    I also quite liked the grey background of the sidebar-boxes.

    CSS-compliance is always good, keep up the great job!

    ++ Ray

  19. By Alex McGeorge (199.111.65.138) mrz0diac [aht] nym [dawt] hush [dawt] com on

    There seems to be a lot of white space in the new lay out, especially between the grey topic bars. The color scheme is fine, but there just seems to be a lot of unused space. I do like the new style of the poll/errata/VuXML/RSS boxes on the right, they look to be more crisp.

  20. By Anonymous Coward (63.241.174.129) on

    There's a new layout?

  21. By [xs] (213.84.75.167) on http://groovebasement.com

    Going the right way! But still a lot of work need to be done. Check also the validator from w3.org.

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnew.undeadly.org

    Keep it up!

  22. By Marco Peereboom (67.64.89.177) slash@peereboom.us on http://www.peereboom.us/

    I'm boring I like the old layout better.

  23. By Lennart Fridén (194.174.65.18) on

    Hmm...doesn't quite look alright in Opera. The top toolbar (Home etc) isn't realy vertically centered on the grey bar so the text intrude on the main white area so to speak.

  24. By Han (82.73.222.20) han@mijncomputer.nl on

    I like the new layout very much. Some minor tweaks have yet to be done but they are obvious. The only thing I'd like to mention is the font. I prefer serif fonts. People who don't like serif fonts have disabled them already ( I suppose ). Now my prefered reading font is overridden by the site.

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