another lenghty post, so I'll start with a summary: - color variations (and all other l&f changes) should be part of the original look-and-feel design. Giving programmers free reign to do this spells disaster. It would be best to have the original designer of a look and feel work this out. Very strictly.
- the navigation setup we currently have sucks. The one used by turbine right now is slightly better, but only slightly. We need arbitrarily deep levels. The best option is a breadcrumb trail. here's the elaboration: Look and Feel ------------- (replying to: > > 2) Project color-scheme > > No problem :-) ) IMHO, look and feel variations should be designed into the template by the original designer, then set in stone. When you say flexible with color, I find that scary. When its "the background color of a locations also containing images", that's a lot of work as well (ie the blue bar on the maven site) as we work with anti-aliased images which you need to duplicate for each color change. I know a bit about this as I was on the team that had to tackle this for www.planet.nl. Rather than having some programmers talk about this, I'd much rather have the original designer propose exactly what parts of the layout can change to what colors. I hope I don't offend anyone too much when I state that, generally speaking, programmers (and other technical people) are really bad at designing intuitive interfaces. Jakarta is no exception. Navigation structure -------------------- I proposed a breadcrumb trail in my earlier post. Berin: > > The question then becomes how do we make Maven's organization > > expand to Jakarta-site3? One thing that we must understand is > > that sub-projects can have sub-projects. Jakarta Commons, > > Jakarta Sandbox, Avalon Excalibur, and Avalon Apps all attest > > to that. Jason: > You can look at the Turbine layout sites for an example of what we've > done. Berin: > > I see the line with the sub-projects able to be two lines tall. > > The first line would be the parent level, and the second line > > would be the current line. I like a breadcrumb trail better. My last post was a bit abstract in explaining, so I'll try an example now... Imagine you're at http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/applications/avalon-db/client/gui/userguide /introduction.html (which might very well exist in the near feature) Using a breadcrumb trail, you'd have apache.org > jakarta > avalon > applications > avalon-db > client > gui > userguide: -== INTRODUCTION ==- in addition to maybe a menu like this: Avalon Client - overview - getting started - download - install - ... GUI User Guide - introduction - the menubar - the db browser - running queries - ... Commandline User Guide - introduction - getting started - command reference - BeanShell integration - ... ... The setup Maven currently provide would have the Jakarta logo, the avalon logo, followed by a list of avalon-db sub projects in the horizontal bar, and the same menu on the left. Using an extra horizontal bar would add a list of avalon-apps sub projects. You would really need at least _another_ horizontal bar. See the problem? Another issue is the ever recurring "how to get back to the main site". While you can click on the logo, there is no visual hint that you can actually do so. A breadcrumb trail solves this. (another option would be to have an "up" button as exists in most directory explorers, but I don't really like the idea of that in documentation. If anyone still disagrees I'll be happy to present you with more issues. (For those that like cold facts better: since the aforementioned www.planet.nl switched to the new layout, which fixes the maximum level you can find yourself at at 3, the site lost many, many visitors.) anyone feel like throwing stones at me yet? :) regards, - Leo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
