pphaneuf Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Brian: on "q-and-a-fetch-msg", at line 21 in the output, replace the 768 with 100% and you're done. I tried it here, looks great. There's another table width set at 768 at the very bottom, replace that one too, so that it's properly centered. I didn't try other pages, but I suppose the same technique would work very well. In the front page, at lines 32, 60 and 315, replace those 768 with 100%, and it also looks great. It's a very simple concept of graphic layout: along a given length, you have to have at least one "rubber" length. You can have a lot, they can be all rubber lengths, but you definitely can't have none. Go ahead and use fixed lengths for a bunch of stuff, but make sure there's at least ONE rubber length and everything will be just fine. So don't tell me I make no sense, I've just told you precisely what lines to change and how, and they're even simple changes too (no crazy JavaScript hacks). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pphaneuf Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Oh, by the way, I should mention that I *do* like the other changes, like the addition of a link back to the thread after posting, and stuff like that. Except for the visited links color, which I really don't like, and with my small modifications, I have to say that the new look is very nice! I'd like to have underlining back (if you don't like it, uncheck the "Underline links" checkbox in your browser, I say!), but I can live without it, if the links are the proper colors. Don't make anything that's not a link be that color too (but I don't think you do)! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pphaneuf Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Eh, you just changed the vlink color! It's less insulting, but too subtly different from the non-visited links. Just leave the colors to their default settings (as I said, I can do without the underlining, even though I prefer it)... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Pierre, the hard-coded 768 pixel widths that you identify are actually in the header and footer tables, not the actual content. As I said, except for pages with tables, the content has floating width. Most of the tables have floating widths (100%), too; but they have a fixed number of columns. The reason that the header is hard-coded to 768 is because of the dynamic pull-down menus. These use dynamic positioning and have an absolute position on the screen [0,200] and effectively a predetermined height and width. Thus, if I didn't make the header a fixed width, I would have the situation where the dynamic pull-down-menus would not resize with the rest of the header -- which looks awful and broken. You have perhaps noticed this behaviour in the old style. I can perhaps fix this problem with the pdm's but the code is complicated and I don't actually have time for this. So instead I fixed the width of the header and footer at 768, and contrived to have the pdm come out at that width too. Is your endorsement of the changes really dependent on the header and footer being able to fill the width of your browser? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rene_theberge Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 A couple of mild complaints. I'm using Netscape 4.73 for the Mac as well as IE 5 for the Mac and occassionally Mozilla. What's frustrating is that the drop down menus used to work for Netscape in the old design, but now they do not even when I've selected them in "my workspace" as suggested. I prefer Netscape because it loads so much faster than when I'm using IE. Also, what's weird is that in Netscape I can click on the blank space where the drop down should be and it takes me to the location I've guessed at. The drop downs even pop up for a second before disappearing! I'm not enamored of the black dropdowns I do get in IE. Is there a way to change the color? Otherwise, I like a lot of the new look. Thanks for the efforts to improver the site. Rene Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joel_becker1 Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 First off, I like the new look. Banners are fine, especially if they stay out of inline content. I have three gripes. The first is the most common: bring back the easy search box. photo.net is a slow-loading site (I assume due to server-side work) and having to go to an additional page is pretty annoying. The second gripe is the lack of support for Netscape/Mozilla. The slow-loading page problem is more pronounced when I have to click through multiple pages to get to forums. Please, give us menus. The third gripe is a hope that the search functions will get better. It's annoying to search for "Nikon 20mm" and not know which responses have "Nikon 20mm" in them and which only have "Nikon". You can't tell until you've actually read each one (and the titles don't help). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frankl Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Hey, what about bringing back one of my favorite features about photonet? The random photo critique photo underneath the POTW that used to display on the main page. I miss that bit of randomness on the main page. I never saw a reason it was removed at the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_h._hartman Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 <em>"Pierre, the hard-coded 768 pixel widths that you identify are actually in the header and footer tables, not the actual content. As I said, except for pages with tables, the content has floating width. Most of the tables have floating widths (100%), too; but they have a fixed number of columns." --Brian Mottershead<br> </em><br> This makes the new PHOTO.NET design look rather ugly and unprofesstional on my display. It appears that the new style was not tested on a wide range of display settings but only on the very out-dated 800x600 setting. I don't come here for the home page so it doesn't matter much to me but I would think PHOTO.NET would rather put its best foot forward and I recommend reworking the design to give a more professional and finished look. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_h._hartman Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 Sorry I renamed the GIF(s) and didn't change the captions. That was the home page, this is the top of this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_h._hartman Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 My caption above got truncated at 50 characters. Is than normal? I�m beginning to feel like the bearer of bad tidings, I�d really rather say I love the new look. I can say that green is a better color for the visited links. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 <center> <img src="http://www.bobatkins.com/temp/header.jpg"><p> </center> <p><p><p> Not sure if it's technically possible, but the header would look better if it could be extended all the way across the screen as shown above. There may be several ways to do this, either by extending the graphic, or maybe by a two column table with the existing graphic in the first column and the continuation in the second. I'm not familiar enough with PDMs to comment on what might be the problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 The attached GIF shows what the page would look like if the headers were not fixed-width and the pull-down menus were turned ON, which is the default for IE, the most common browser. The pull-down menus are fixed width and I don't have time to rewrite them. There is basically no win on this issue. I can (1) I rewrite the pull-down menus so that the headers don't have to be fixed width. This is going to take a lot of time. (2) I fix the width of all pages so that they are aesthetically pleasing in combination with the fixed-width headers, eliminating the problem shown by David Hartman. This will cause people to go nuts. (3) I eliminate the pull-down menus, which I am sorely tempted to do since they are slow and klunky-looking. However, again people will go nuts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I probably shouldn't say this; but it does piss me off when people make comments like "this obviously was only tested in such-and-such environment". The people working on this site are not morons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david_h._hartman Posted February 21, 2003 Share Posted February 21, 2003 I didnt say <em>"this obviously was"</em> Isaid <em>"It appears that"</em> thats qualified,that is I tried to soften it and that is honestly what it looks like to me no matter what actually transpired. Constructive criticism isntoften pleasant.<br><br>Even worse is to make a website, small, nothing like this one,and have two or perhaps three out of a hundred club members tellyou its great when you know its only good as a firsteffort. Then suspecting no one was visiting the site I put acounter on it found I was the only one visiting the site. Itwould have helped if someone had told me what was wrong or why noone was interested but apparently no one cared enough to do eventhat.<br><br>Anyway Brian Im off your case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 No good deed goes unpunished I'm afraid. It's virtually impossible to test every change with every browser, every available proxy, every OS and every screen resolution without a sizeable staff of paid programmers, or at least one full time programmer who does nothing else but test the interface and an unlimited time in which to do it. Photo.net has neither. By giving users things like fancy drop down menus you really create work for yourself. It may look neat, but it may require huge amounts of work. Then when you decide they are too much work and would be better removed, people yell and scream. In fact people yell and scream pretty much whatever changes you make. The vast majority of users won't customize anything, even given the option. They just take the defaults. They've never heard of CSS. They don't know where their browser options are, or even that they have browser options. Keeping them happy alongside professional graphic designers and advannced web publishers is a daunting task indeed. As I said, no good deed goes unpunished and I think we should thank Brian for doing a great job. I'm sure things may SLOWLY get changed but to expect instant updates on a system that runs on a shoestring with virtually no staff and with the vast majority of users giving no financial support to site development and upkeep is simply unreasonable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pphaneuf Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 The narrow top menu does look pretty weird, at any rate. I do have a simple solution, again. Just add an empty column to the right of the menu to take up the remaining slack as the "rubber length" (like Bob showed in his mock (?)), while making the menu headers be fixed width (so that the drop-down menues stay aligned with them). Hmm, the visited links are green on my home box, or has it changed back? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allan_jamieson2 Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 Strangely enough after not working at all yesterday for me, the drop down menus are back, but much darker and heavier looking. But, that doesn't matter too much, just as long as they work! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 Pierre, the pull down menu is not a table. It is a ridiculously complicated set of dynamically-positioned DIV elements created in Javascript code, which are hidden or made visible based on mouse movements. In fact, for the menu bar, each top-level pull-down, each pull-right sub-menu, and each sub-sub-menu, there are two DIV's: one with the normal colors, another overlaid on top of that for the "hover" rendering. There are a few other DIV's thrown in for other purposes. The code that does all this is long and intricate. This is why the pull down menus have a major hit on perceived page load times. I am in fact experimenting with the approach of leaving all this stuff alone, but creating a regular table with the same height and background as the pull-down-menus, but taking 100% of the width of the page, and absolutely positioning it behind so that it is exactly behind the pull-down menus. The idea is that when it grows it looks like the pull-down menus would if they were a table with an elastic extra column expanding to the right. This is the only thing I can think of without touching the code for the pull-down-menus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmj Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 My first reaction to most website layout changes is "Oh no, they ruined it," but usually I find the new layout quite acceptable after a few days. So, I should perhaps wait-and-see a bit more. <p> However, I find some of the pages very cramped, with a lot of links and barely any whitespace. And I had just made up my mind that I really like the layout of the new Mike Johnston columns, with plenty of whitespace. <p> I decided to play a bit with two pages to see if I could come up with something more pleasing (to my own, very personal, highly individual taste -- obviously). Attached is my attempt at redecorating my own D1H review. I centered the photo.net header, added a "margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em;" style tag and fiddled just a bit more. I think it looks better. I also realise we cannot go through the filesystem and update all articles this way to do the "extra bit of fiddling", but maybe portions of my hackery can be considered.<div></div> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rob loxley Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 For those that think 800 pixels is limiting, you'd be amused to hear that the BBC News site (news.bbc.co.uk) has only just upped its page width from 600 to 800 pixels! It still irritatingly fixes the whole page width at 800 pixels - tedious if you run your monitor at a much higher resolution. Thankfully PN doesn't do this. P.S. I do like the re-re-updated unified forum view. The new table layout and grey/white rows are really good, better than the old bulleted list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iwrh1 Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 <blockquote><i>Pierre, the pull down menu is not a table. It is a ridiculously complicated set of dynamically-positioned DIV elements created in Javascript code, which are hidden or made visible based on mouse movements. In fact, for the menu bar, each top-level pull-down, each pull-right sub-menu, and each sub-sub-menu, there are two DIV's: one with the normal colors, another overlaid on top of that for the "hover" rendering. There are a few other DIV's thrown in for other purposes. The code that does all this is long and intricate. This is why the pull down menus have a major hit on perceived page load times.</i></blockquote>Don't you think all that together makes a strong argument for scrapping the code alltogether?<p>I just turned on javascript (i <b>never</b> surf with javascript) and noticed the menus for the first time in 2 years. I'm going to turn it back off right away. Load times are prohibitive, even on a DSL line and the site has been perfectly usable without them. So why bother at all? <p>I think there is only one raison d'être for javascript based web sites: you are working for a company whose business targets that lowest common denominator customer who is running IE 5.x or higher. There is no other reason. Javascript security is flawed and implementations are famously broken. You can not write successful web interfaces with javascript. I think the art of web designing does not consist of trying to mimick common event-driven GUIs on top of applications that are inherently network-dependent, but to invent truly apt, reduced and functional interfaces of your own. A drop-down menu is sluggish, the code is, as you say yourself, error-prone (read: won't ever reliably work) and with the slightest bit of network latency, noone will ever want to use it anyway. There are better ways. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted February 22, 2003 Share Posted February 22, 2003 Tobias, I would be delighted to rip out the pull down menus. As I said already in this thread, they are slow, klunky-looking, buggy, not supported on all browsers, and a maintenance headache. However, they are and have been the default for people with IE and other browsers that theoretically support them, and if I turned them off, I would have loud protests in the forums and emails from people asking what happened to them for weeks. Something I did in the last code revisions does seem to have caused them to stop working on Netscape and the AOL Browser (where they weren't ever supported anyway), and I am already getting complaints. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lex_jenkins Posted February 22, 2003 Author Share Posted February 22, 2003 Red? Okay, red is good. Green, red, I'm easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iwrh1 Posted February 23, 2003 Share Posted February 23, 2003 <blockquote><i>I would be delighted to rip out the pull down menus [...] however, [...] if I turned them off, I would have loud protests in the forums and emails from people asking what happened to them</i></blockquote> All these protests should go to /dev/null. And an addition to the FAQ couldbe made to the effect of "pull-downs scrapped since maintenance nightmareand superfluous anyway". Because, truth of the matter is, the <i>aresuperfluous</i>. The "Community" menu, for instance, when clicked, pulls upthe "Community" page, which has all the links that the menu has. And soforth. As long as these "Index" pages don't require a database lookup, I'd expect they'd be served <i>way</i> faster than the pull-down menu.<p>I think development/maintenance time could be spent better on other things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted February 23, 2003 Share Posted February 23, 2003 <em>...All these protests should go to /dev/null...</em><p>An interesting, perceptive and somewhat self-fulfilling comment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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