Re: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
Jason van Zyl wrote: Dealing with umbrella sites is definitely something that people want some advice on how to do best. An umbrella page is really an aggregation of all information contained within all the subprojects. So in this case maybe we need a different kind of page. Possibly having a page with a reference to all the projects contained within instead of trying to stuff them all in the navigation. ... Come up with a clean page with a nicely formatted table of all the projects contained within, possibly with a short summary (taken from the short description) and a pointer to the subproject page. A very BIG +1. ... Looking at the first page of the commons-math site, I am immediately presented with a list of things: there is no summary of what the project is or does which. Instead of having a link to About Math it should tell you right there on the first page and the user guide be a hot item in the first set of navigations. A Point well taken, I think that in the main index.html page for Math we should give a more solid overview of the project and provide some important links. I also think it would be wise to support generation of a Site Map (I may be ignorant and this actually already exists?) Especially something that can easily be aggregated into the umbrella project. -Mark -- Mark Diggory Software Developer Harvard MIT Data Center http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I like the idea of the blue bgcolor for non-focused tabs, but I'd also say
to use a lighter gray for the fg of those tabs (increases contrast and
readability). As for the pipes, it's a simple solution and seems very
effective on other sites.
yep
One thing, though: I think the part that needs the most attention is that
tertiary nav (Overview, Statistics, etc.). It's not really contained by
anything visually (other than a rule hr/ ?), and would probably benefit
greatly from the piping, etc. or maybe some type of different font or
font-style, font-weight, etc. I dunno exactly what I'm trying to do here
visually, only that it needs to stand out a little more.
I played around a little in EditCSS, and thought this, combined with the
piping, might work:
div.bar ul.subnav2 {
z-index: 101;
background-color:#eee;
position:relative;
margin: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding: 0px 0px 1px 50px;
/*padding: 1px 0px 3px 30px;*/
/*border-top:1px solid #fff;*/
border-bottom:1px solid #999;
height: 15px;
clear:both;
}
with css, you can easily control the delimiter with something like
div.bar ul.subnav2 li:before {
content: | ;
}
thanks, I'll give it a try, I'll be adding the alternate navi contents
to the commons-build project shortly.
Please keep in mind that I'm infinitely better at critiquing other work than
producing my own when it comes to web interfacing. :)
Cheers,
John
Arn't we all ;-)
--
Mark Diggory
Software Developer
Harvard MIT Data Center
http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu
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RE: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
I like the idea of the blue bgcolor for non-focused tabs, but I'd also say
to use a lighter gray for the fg of those tabs (increases contrast and
readability). As for the pipes, it's a simple solution and seems very
effective on other sites.
One thing, though: I think the part that needs the most attention is that
tertiary nav (Overview, Statistics, etc.). It's not really contained by
anything visually (other than a rule hr/ ?), and would probably benefit
greatly from the piping, etc. or maybe some type of different font or
font-style, font-weight, etc. I dunno exactly what I'm trying to do here
visually, only that it needs to stand out a little more.
I played around a little in EditCSS, and thought this, combined with the
piping, might work:
div.bar ul.subnav2 {
z-index: 101;
background-color:#eee;
position:relative;
margin: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding: 0px 0px 1px 50px;
/*padding: 1px 0px 3px 30px;*/
/*border-top:1px solid #fff;*/
border-bottom:1px solid #999;
height: 15px;
clear:both;
}
Please keep in mind that I'm infinitely better at critiquing other work than
producing my own when it comes to web interfacing. :)
Cheers,
John
-Original Message-
From: Mark R. Diggory [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2004 11:02 AM
To: Maven Developers List
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project
Navigation]
Can you make any recommendations on colors for tab background or fonts
that would be better? I'm think of maybe using the h1 background color
for the active tabs (blue) with the h2 class as the bgcolor for
inactive tabs.
I also was going to use a css property to place a pipe delimiter between
the menu options, I glad someone else recognized value in this as well.
-Mark
John Casey wrote:
Personally, I like how it works with an umbrella project (Jakarta), but
really don't like the current contrast of the menus. It's hard to read,
and hard to visually pull out the link breaks. But I'd say it's really
close to being a nice alternative.
Just my 2c.
-john
On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 07:55, Mark R. Diggory wrote:
I thought it'd be good to forward this onto you Crazy Maven
Developers. What do you think about horizontal project navigation:
http://www.apache.org/~mdiggory/commons/math/userguide/index.html
-Mark
Original Message
Ok I added the following:
1.) first three navi levels stay the same height if content present or
not.
2.) nested custom project documentation menus under About Project
(requires special formating (and menu/@type=tab attribute to be
visible there).
3.) disabled Development Process button (working on removing it).
As an example of three levels being filled:
http://www.apache.org/~mdiggory/commons/math/userguide/index.html
-Mark
Tim O'Brien wrote:
I think this helps. Although the About Math tab should have a blank
subtab for consistency.
...now the left nav - it is s busy.
Tim
Mark R. Diggory wrote:
I worked out the kinks on an alternate project navigation, please have
a look and comment:
http://www.apache.org/~mdiggory/commons/math/project-info.html
Pro's
1.) Navigation better integrated into page layout.
2.) Horizontal positioning at top of page more traditional for
navigation.
3.) Strong CSS control over look and feel, 0% javascript
4.) Clearly separates Shared Commons Navigation from Individual
Project Navigation.
Con's
1.) Limits number of items on a level to the width of the page
(although it does provide wrapping when items are greater than width).
2.) Currently limited to menus nested three levels deep.
(but easily extendable to more).
3.) Currently doesn't integrate custom project navigation.
(but could easily be adapted for such support, I had initially
included it, but encountered small issues with merging two separate
menu sets).
I think its important to clearly separate the Projects Navigation
from the overall shared Commons Navigation, I believe positioning
them in very separate locations of the site gives the user a much
clearer path and ease in determining the level of the site they are
within.
-Mark
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RE: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
My only beef with the current style is what happens when you have tons of sub-projects, as in the case of Jakarta Commons. When you start stacking many different scopes of detail on top of one another down the left sidebar, it becomes hard to differentiate between scope divisions. I know, the headers should be a clue, but it does get a bit overwhelming... Maven's plugins reference would have a similar problem, if it were constructed in this way. Another problem with the volume of information is that it tends to lead off-screen, where scrolling to read destroys the coherence of the sidebar information. Personally, I'd much rather have a dashboard at the top (where applications, not just _web_ applications traditionally have a menubar) where I can see the operations near at hand, like details of this project. This may seem like replication of the top part of the sidebar, but it pops out to the eye quite a bit more readily than a subsection of this gigantic list on the left (all of the same font size, etc.). Final note: The content area is what you define it to be. If you frame a page properly, it will be obvious what is and is not the content area. Top/Left are premium real estate because they naturally frame any page content, so maybe shrinking the _huge_ logo at the top and/or allowing the embedding of some navigation in that top 10% of the page (I'm guessing) would help free up some space for the actual content. Another would be to take a page from the Safari website, and allow the user to hide the sidebar, in order to read the content. I know that the Commons website isn't probably organized in the best possible way wrt what is/isn't on the sidebar, but I definitely think the site rendering should provide some not-so-subtle visual clues about what is nearby, or important. Prepending these links to the top of a long list without even changing the text formatting in my opinion doesn't handle this very well. -john -Original Message- From: Jason van Zyl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 23, 2004 11:24 AM To: Maven Developers List Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigation] On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 07:55, Mark R. Diggory wrote: I thought it'd be good to forward this onto you Crazy Maven Developers. What do you think about horizontal project navigation: http://www.apache.org/~mdiggory/commons/math/userguide/index.html What you have in the tabs across the top is akin to what I would like to see as the first entries on the left in the navigation. I honestly don't much like the tabs and like the navigation in the nav bar on the left or in the breadcrumb bar. I think having navigation in the body of the page with the content isn't a good thing. I think people will naturally look to the upper left (as the majority of people dealing with computer stuff use English as the primary language which reads left to right) to find things of importance and that's where I would honestly like to see the things of navigational importance go. I've given up on trying to make the sites all look exactly the same as far as colour and general style but I would really, really not like to see each project start changing the navigation style. I realize the currently generated site is lacking in terms of ease of use but I would like to incorporate any ideas like you have into the standard xdoc plugin so that the sites being generated remain functioning the same at least in terms of navigational style. -Mark Original Message Ok I added the following: 1.) first three navi levels stay the same height if content present or not. 2.) nested custom project documentation menus under About Project (requires special formating (and menu/@type=tab attribute to be visible there). 3.) disabled Development Process button (working on removing it). As an example of three levels being filled: http://www.apache.org/~mdiggory/commons/math/userguide/index.html -Mark Tim O'Brien wrote: I think this helps. Although the About Math tab should have a blank subtab for consistency. ...now the left nav - it is s busy. Tim Mark R. Diggory wrote: I worked out the kinks on an alternate project navigation, please have a look and comment: http://www.apache.org/~mdiggory/commons/math/project-info.html Pro's 1.) Navigation better integrated into page layout. 2.) Horizontal positioning at top of page more traditional for navigation. 3.) Strong CSS control over look and feel, 0% javascript 4.) Clearly separates Shared Commons Navigation from Individual Project Navigation. Con's 1.) Limits number of items on a level to the width of the page (although it does provide wrapping when items are greater than width). 2.) Currently limited to menus nested three levels deep. (but easily extendable to more). 3.) Currently doesn't integrate custom project navigation. (but could easily be
RE: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 11:37, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My only beef with the current style is what happens when you have tons of sub-projects, as in the case of Jakarta Commons. When you start stacking many different scopes of detail on top of one another down the left sidebar, it becomes hard to differentiate between scope divisions. I know, the headers should be a clue, but it does get a bit overwhelming... Maven's plugins reference would have a similar problem, if it were constructed in this way. Dealing with umbrella sites is definitely something that people want some advice on how to do best. An umbrella page is really an aggregation of all information contained within all the subprojects. So in this case maybe we need a different kind of page. Possibly having a page with a reference to all the projects contained within instead of trying to stuff them all in the navigation. The umbrella page can contain all the things like project goals, licenses, pointers to mailing lists and the like but maybe we need a standard format for an umbrella project? I agree that the navigation for the commons is a little unweildly and will become moreso as the number of components grows. Come up with a clean page with a nicely formatted table of all the projects contained within, possibly with a short summary (taken from the short description) and a pointer to the subproject page. Another problem with the volume of information is that it tends to lead off-screen, where scrolling to read destroys the coherence of the sidebar information. Definitely, this is where I think a page containing a list of the subprojects would be good. Having to scroll does indeed make wandering through a site annoying. Personally, I'd much rather have a dashboard at the top (where applications, not just _web_ applications traditionally have a menubar) where I can see the operations near at hand, like details of this project. This may seem like replication of the top part of the sidebar, but it pops out to the eye quite a bit more readily than a subsection of this gigantic list on the left (all of the same font size, etc.). For an application I too like the dashboard. For a maven generated site I have always been of the mind that the front page first paragraph of of the first section should tell you What is this beast?. I'm sure it's a matter of habit for me now, but I read that first paragraph and then I wander left to the navigation and in the first navigation section is where the hot items should go like javadoc, downloads, cvs repos. Looking at the first page of the commons-math site, I am immediately presented with a list of things: there is no summary of what the project is or does which. Instead of having a link to About Math it should tell you right there on the first page and the user guide be a hot item in the first set of navigations. Additionally, Maven's users guide suffers the same problem where scrolling of the table of contents is necessary. Though commons-math is much better in that you link to each section so you can click around without scrolling much. There are certainly some guidelines for good sites like Jacob Nielsen's books but to a large extent I think there is an element of conditioning and if we come up with a reasonably sensible, standard format then everyone benefits. I agree with you 100% that navigation without scrolling should be a goal to strive for and we can help with that by providing tools to make easily navigable user guides, FAQs and templates for aggregated sites. Final note: The content area is what you define it to be. If you frame a page properly, it will be obvious what is and is not the content area. Top/Left are premium real estate because they naturally frame any page content, so maybe shrinking the _huge_ logo at the top and/or allowing the embedding of some navigation in that top 10% of the page (I'm guessing) would help free up some space for the actual content. Another would be to take a page from the Safari website, and allow the user to hide the sidebar, in order to read the content. All good ideas, and these are the things I would like to incorporate into the xdoc plugin. I know that the Commons website isn't probably organized in the best possible way wrt what is/isn't on the sidebar, but I definitely think the site rendering should provide some not-so-subtle visual clues about what is nearby, or important. Prepending these links to the top of a long list without even changing the text formatting in my opinion doesn't handle this very well. Point taken, coherent navigation is not a simple task. Maybe the first set of navigations could be visually slightly different in some way? -john -Original Message- From: Jason van Zyl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 23, 2004 11:24 AM To: Maven Developers List Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigation] On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 07:55, Mark
RE: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
My only beef with the current style is what happens when you have tons of sub-projects, as in the case of Jakarta Commons. When you start stacking many different scopes of detail on top of one another down the left sidebar, it becomes hard to differentiate between scope divisions. I know, the headers should be a clue, but it does get a bit overwhelming... Maven's plugins reference would have a similar problem, if it were constructed in this way. There's already a patch for this on jira, though not yet in CVS: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ViewIssue.jspa?key=MPXDOC-78 __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: Re: [commons-site] Alternate Horizontal Project Navigat ion]
I'd like to chat more on this, but I'm totally swamped today. Maybe I can respond later tonite. I agree with alot of the discussion, what I built is primarily a prototype with tons of room for input. Anyone who wants to step up to bat and play around with it, I will provide the alternate site.jsl and various css styles in the commons-site cvs tree for play. Later tonite I illtry to catchup with the discussion and see if I can work on some implementation. -Mark Jason van Zyl wrote: On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 11:37, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My only beef with the current style is what happens when you have tons of sub-projects, as in the case of Jakarta Commons. When you start stacking many different scopes of detail on top of one another down the left sidebar, it becomes hard to differentiate between scope divisions. I know, the headers should be a clue, but it does get a bit overwhelming... Maven's plugins reference would have a similar problem, if it were constructed in this way. Dealing with umbrella sites is definitely something that people want some advice on how to do best. An umbrella page is really an aggregation of all information contained within all the subprojects. So in this case maybe we need a different kind of page. Possibly having a page with a reference to all the projects contained within instead of trying to stuff them all in the navigation. The umbrella page can contain all the things like project goals, licenses, pointers to mailing lists and the like but maybe we need a standard format for an umbrella project? I agree that the navigation for the commons is a little unweildly and will become moreso as the number of components grows. Come up with a clean page with a nicely formatted table of all the projects contained within, possibly with a short summary (taken from the short description) and a pointer to the subproject page. Another problem with the volume of information is that it tends to lead off-screen, where scrolling to read destroys the coherence of the sidebar information. Definitely, this is where I think a page containing a list of the subprojects would be good. Having to scroll does indeed make wandering through a site annoying. Personally, I'd much rather have a dashboard at the top (where applications, not just _web_ applications traditionally have a menubar) where I can see the operations near at hand, like details of this project. This may seem like replication of the top part of the sidebar, but it pops out to the eye quite a bit more readily than a subsection of this gigantic list on the left (all of the same font size, etc.). For an application I too like the dashboard. For a maven generated site I have always been of the mind that the front page first paragraph of of the first section should tell you What is this beast?. I'm sure it's a matter of habit for me now, but I read that first paragraph and then I wander left to the navigation and in the first navigation section is where the hot items should go like javadoc, downloads, cvs repos. Looking at the first page of the commons-math site, I am immediately presented with a list of things: there is no summary of what the project is or does which. Instead of having a link to About Math it should tell you right there on the first page and the user guide be a hot item in the first set of navigations. Additionally, Maven's users guide suffers the same problem where scrolling of the table of contents is necessary. Though commons-math is much better in that you link to each section so you can click around without scrolling much. There are certainly some guidelines for good sites like Jacob Nielsen's books but to a large extent I think there is an element of conditioning and if we come up with a reasonably sensible, standard format then everyone benefits. I agree with you 100% that navigation without scrolling should be a goal to strive for and we can help with that by providing tools to make easily navigable user guides, FAQs and templates for aggregated sites. Final note: The content area is what you define it to be. If you frame a page properly, it will be obvious what is and is not the content area. Top/Left are premium real estate because they naturally frame any page content, so maybe shrinking the _huge_ logo at the top and/or allowing the embedding of some navigation in that top 10% of the page (I'm guessing) would help free up some space for the actual content. Another would be to take a page from the Safari website, and allow the user to hide the sidebar, in order to read the content. All good ideas, and these are the things I would like to incorporate into the xdoc plugin. I know that the Commons website isn't probably organized in the best possible way wrt what is/isn't on the sidebar, but I definitely think the site rendering should provide some not-so-subtle visual clues about what is nearby, or important. Prepending these links to the top of a long list without even changing the text
