Aaagh! Re: [Clipart] new site design in progress

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> I really preferred the old layout.  

I (mostly) liked what we saw in the screenshot, but what is up now is
much worse.  Are these changes deliberate, or are we designing around
a specific browser?  What's up currently looks horrible in Gecko and
not very great in IE 5.5.  Screenshots here:
http://www.bright.net/~jonadab/openclipart-firefox.png
http://www.bright.net/~jonadab/openclipart-msie.png

(Don't worry about the colours in firefox; those are my overrides.  My
eyes are too sensitive to light to look at bright white backgrounds
for more than a minute or so at a time, so I always browse with page
colours disabled.  IE doesn't have the overrides because I only use it
to see what pages look like in IE, which only takes a few seconds, so
I don't go snowblind.)

Also, there's no close tag for the content div.  That could be part of
the problem; bad markup can lead to a bad parse tree and thus can mess
up the application of stylesheets.  Or it could be unrelated.  Either
way, we should close off that div element.

> Now it looks like it is using frames, 

Yeah.  The multitudinous excessive scrollbars have to die.  Fast.
(See the above-linked screenshots.)  There's nothing in the HTML
markup to make it like that.  I assume it's some weird oddball thing
in the stylesheet?  Whatever it is, I hate it.  Oh, and *why* is there
a little *nested* scrolling area for the row of buttons (sourceforge,
creative commons, W3C validity) and the links below them?  That's
sick, twisted, and wrong.  Make it go away.

For added bonus points, the logo and the (image of) text next to it
now overlaps the text right below, i.e., the download links.

Something is very wrong here.  It feels to me like someone has used a
GUI-based WYSIWYG HTML authoring tool targeted to one specific
browser.  As an open-source project, we absolutely cannot have that
kind of website.  OCAL cannot afford to drive away Mozilla users.

> The Search tool is no longer clearly labelled as "Search".
  
It's not very accessible, either, due to the aforementioned overlapping.
  
> "Get Clipart Packages" is not as obvious as "Downloads" or "Download
> Clipart"
  
No, "Get Clipart Packages" is better, because it specifies exactly
what the user is going to get.  "Download Clipart Packages" would be
okay, I suppose, but "Download Clipart" is going to make the user
think he's going to get a browse interface for downloading clipart
images, which isn't what that link points to.

> None of the links are underline anymore.

I don't have a problem with that.

> The blues are okay but the greenish-grey colour is not very pleasant.

[Looks at it with page colours enabled...]

It's been darkened.  It was better in the screenshot, here:
http://rejon.org/website-snapshot.png

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