On 1/18/15 4:57 PM, Mike wrote:
On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 02:18:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I took the better part of today working on this:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/780. See demo
at http://erdani.com/d/.
What do you all think? Is it an improvement over what we have now?
I'd appreciate your help with reviewing and pulling this, and also
with improving the colors (which I'm terrible at) and page tracking as
mentioned in the pull request.
What are your primary concerns with the website? I think it would help
to know what you are trying to achieve.
Good point.
1. The site design/styling is old. Simply changing it is now necessary
just as a refresher.
2. Of course, we'd also like things to be better. The chaotic navigation
menu on the left was something I long wished to replace with a more
modern on.
3. Part of my effort is to replace all manual html ad-hoc styles with
styles in the css. That is invisible right now but will become very
useful when we pass the site for improvement to a specialist.
Personally, although dlang.org isn't particularly pretty, I think its
fine. It's the unmaintained and unfinished content that's the real
problem, not the aesthetics. I've made a number of PRs to move
"unofficial" content to the wiki so it could be better maintained there,
and if not maintained, at least appear less official.
Thanks!
I believe
dlang.org's lack of maintenance is partially due to the issues mentioned
below. I've tried to do some improvements on dlang.org, and its a PITA. If it
were made more convenient, there would be greater participation from me,
and likely others. So, I offer the following suggestion:
1) Modify the build scripts and the instructions on dlang.org so that
it's abundantly clear how to fork, modify, build, verify, submit PRs
without having read verbose instructions and without having to clone and
build dmd, druntime, phobos, and other repositories just to get an html
page to verify an edit. I would do this myself, but an important
prerequisite to updating build scripts and documentation is knowledge,
which I have yet to possess. But someone in this community knows.
We definitely need to get that working. There are a couple of blocking
issues (like the interference of local configuration files on the site
build) but I trust we'll get over them soon.
2) Aside from the documentation generated from the source code, why does
the website need to be "built"? IMO a static website like dlang.org
shouldn't need any additional tools other than a browser and an image
editor. I may explore some options later, but only after 1) is done.
The short answer is because there's no robust inclusion and code reuse
solution at HTML level.
Andrei
