For me it makes the difference between being able to use the site or not.
I've spent as little time as I could on the site since the redesign. The
black borders are very hard on my eyes, and I have a lot of trouble reading
small sizes of Trebuchet. (I know I can blow up the text with Ctrl+Plus, but
the black borders are still there, and it's still Trebuchet.)
So Eric, I for one very much appreciate your posting the link to that
Stylish patch.
It doesn't quite go far enough, though. The text is still much smaller than
the old site, and it's using Arial - certainly an improvement over
Trebuchet, but Verdana is much more readable than either.
But with the tools in hand, now I can easily tinker with the styles.
For anyone who likes big, easy to read type, install the Stylish patch and
open a jquery.com page you want to read (such as a docs detail page) Then go
into the Stylish options panel (from the Firefox Add-ons list) and change
two lines in the body styles at the beginning...
From:
font-size: 62.5% !important;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif !important;
To:
font-size: 75% !important;
font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif !important;
Use the Preview button and adjust the font size to your taste.
Now THAT'S an easy to read site. Beautiful!
The home page text is too big with this setting, but that's OK. Some other
pages are still using a smaller font, but the docs pages are just right for
my eyes. (The text on the docs *index* pages is a bit large, but the docs
*detail* pages use two smaller sizes along with this larger size.) Will
investigate when I have some time, but at least the main thing I need is
fixed.
The jQuery Google Group still has the black borders, but I'll bet a similar
trick could be used there.
Many thanks, Eric! (And thanks to Karan Bhangui who put together the Stylish
patch.)
-Mike
p.s. I also mean no offense to Scott who designed the new site. But the new
design is unusable for so many people including myself. I am still hoping we
can find a way to combine a design you guys like with usability for the rest
of us. (And really, shouldn't usability trump style?)
> From: ricardobeat
>
> It's been there for a few months already, I doubt anyone is
> considering rolling back the old theme...
>
> I don't know what your design background is, but the new
> style certainly looks more up to date than the old 'htmlish'
> one. And things are not all that different, everything is
> mostly in the same place but with a dark background, type is
> the same, font sizes are the same.
>
> - ricardo
> > From: Eric Ongerth
> > Hi everyone. I miss the previous visual design of the
> > jQuery site... I was away for a few months and when
> > I got back it looked like it had stepped a couple of years
> > backward and taken on a very Rails-in-the-early-days
> > look with that Trebuchet font and big empty sidebars...
> >
> > No offense intended to its current designer, but I really
> > loved the openness, readability, and space efficiency of
> > the older version.
> >
> > Temporary solution for those who share my dismay:
> > this guy CSS'd up a nearly complete fix -- if you're
> > using Firefox you can get this almost instantly here:
> >
> > http://userstyles.org/styles/11536
> >
> > He pretty much put it right back in the earlier style,
> > much more readable, and adds nothing to the load
> > time since it's client-side CSS on a tiny, tiny FF plugin.
> >
> > Check it out!
> > (and to John and the site's maintainers... any chance
> > we might see a rollback of this weird move?)
