Perl and Search.perl.org are not in need of replacement?
BTW what is happening to Julian Assange?
et Brutus! part of big brother scam.. ?
On 2018-05-23 12:33 AM, Octavian Rasnita wrote:
"2) It’s not “shutting down” so much as it is being replaced by the
existing MetaCPAN search site. This is positive news about the future
of Perl: an older, less capable tool has been replaced"
metacpan.org has some disadvantages compared with search.cpan.org, and
some missing features, so it is not positive news for everybody.
Unlike search.cpan.org, metacpan doesn't use a heading for each record
found, so it is much harder to navigate among the found results when
using a screen reader.
Metacpan's interface is not as standard as search.cpan.org's
interface. After searching something and the results are shown, it is
less intuitive where begins the group of links for a record (module or
distribution) and where it ends, especially that the number of links
differ among different modules/distributions found.
If the interface is made intuitive just by using different colors for
different things or by a special positioning on site, these things
doesn't met the web accessibility guidelines, and are useless for the
blind.
These disadvantages are there for many years, there is no contact data
where they can be reported easy, the soft behind metacpan is open
source so if somebody don't like something might be invited to make
the improvements himself, with the efforts involved, and this while
there is a more accessible solution already that don't need any effort
to be used.
Plus that with its current non-intuitive interface where the results
found are not similar, it could be even harder to do the necessary
improvements. Which of the links in a result should appear as heading,
so the screen reader users should be able to jump among easier? The
distribution name appears in all results, but it is usually not very
relevant. More relevant are the module names, but for each record
there may be one or more modules displayed and it would be not good to
mark them all as headings, because they all point to the same
distribution.
On search.cpan.org it was a very good solution to be able to choose to
display each module as a distinct record, or each distribution as a
distinct record, depending on what you need.
In the pages that describe the modules, the text is badly formatted to
look nicer just for the sighted, but it is hard to understand by the
blind.
Here is how a description text appears like for screen readers:
package
link MyKwikiFormatter
;
use
link base
'link CGI::Kwiki::Formatter'
;
... while it should be looking like:
package MyKwikiFormatter;
use base 'CGI::Kwiki::Formatter';
This is because some parts of the text like module names appear as
links, which are read by the screen reader as text on distinct lines,
with the word "link" before them.
And there are also other smaller things that metacpan to look worse,
for example for the <h1> elements for NAME, DESCRIPTION etc, instead
to appear just a single time as links in a level 1 heading, they
appear twice and they are read like:
#NAME
NAME
even if I don't know why, because #NAME appears just as a value of the
href attribute, but who knows what are doing the JS and CSS code...
--Octavian
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