I have been playing the last couple of days with the website
(http://www.gnucash.org/beta/). In particular with the documentation
page (http://www.gnucash.org/beta/docs.phtml).
It bothered me that when a link to one of the documents (help or guide)
was clicked, the document opened, but we lost all the gnucash site's
specifics, such as the header, and the menu.
I worked out an idea in the beta site that displays the chosen document
in an iframe. There are some benefits and drawbacks to this approach.
On the good side:
- the user gets the feeling of staying on the same website, so it's easy
to navigate to other parts of the site.
- while looking at a document, you can change the language on top to
view the document in the desired language. If the document is not
available in that language, the English version is displayed instead
with a friendly notification on top.
Drawbacks:
- iframes are not really flexible to layout. I had to define a min-width
for it or it would only show about 200px wide. The same goes for the
height. I had to set a fixed height, it doesn't auto-adjust to the
contents being displayed.
- disadvantage of the fixed with/height: if the contents doesn't fit, a
scroll bar is added to the iframe itself. So you can end up with two
scroll bars. There is no way around these limitations with pure
html/css. It may be fixed with javascript (found some references on
stackoverflow in that direction), but didn't bother to investigate that.
If people like the new way, I leave it as an exercise for someone more
experienced in webdesign to pick this up.
Finally, one thing that could be seen either as a bonus or a drawback:
when you select a document in a language different from the current one
on the documents page, the whole website changes to the new language,
not only the document displayed. For me it's ok as it is now, but this
can relatively easily be changed of not wanted.
Tell me what you think of this. Is it worth promoting to the main website ?
Geert
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