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#97 2008-08-12 21:35:04
- uli
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- From: Cologne
- Registered: 2006-08-15
- Posts: 4,313
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Sorry for the confusion, Peter.
I set your 1.3em to 0.95, in order to make Verdana and Monaco look halfway identical in size.
I’ve set all my browser prefs for both monospaced and proportional fonts’ sizes to identical values, and no matter whether viewed on FF3, SAF2 or OP9.2, the code font is huge, and Monaco adds a little in size compared to Courier.
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
LOL! I’m using linux with firefox, opera, ie so that’s why I didn’t want to go higher than 1.3, but the others are saying 1.3em is good. I can’t please all of you!
The h2 style is built in and I like it. I know what you mean about separation from text below but can you live with it, ruud. Nobody else has complained. It looks fine on non-tag pages, imho, and on tag pages it separates sections well. It is the first time I’ve used this style too and I was always of the same mind as you about an underline separating the heading from the text it belongs to. But I’ve grown used to it and like it now. It seems well accepted on many other web sites I’ve seen too.
The underlined words are just in the code. That’s how Bert did ‘em and I’ve continued. You may want to click them but soon learn it’s the coloured one’s that are clickable. They are the only underlines on the site and the links aren’t underlined so although it’s unusual, I don’t think it hurts. I could do a search and replace on these though but what to: bold or italic?
And now the H3 instead of definition list. Again that’s how Bert did ‘em, so I followed suit. (Sorry, Bert, not meaning to blame you because your solution seemed as good as any at the time to me). We know about plugin updating and the def list plugins don’t seem that popular so may drop by the wayside leaving us with funny styling. The h3 followed by a paragraph groups those together correctly. Problem with making it sans-serif there is that all other headings are serif so h3 would look out of place in other contexts. Changing all the attributes would mean altering every tag page manually because search and replace wouldn’t work. And just to put things into context, here’s the code from existing Textbook similar to all definition lists, just for the sake of making it look right. This ones for section_list:
; <code><b>[[Attributes_Cross_Reference#sections|sections]]="</b><em>section name(s)</em><b>"</b></code> : Comma-separated list of section names to include in the list, displayed in specified order (unless overriden with <code><b>sort</b></code> attribute). Default is unset, leading to an unrestricted list of <em>all</em> sections.A right mess.
There’s a problem with h3 in that no extra formatting like bold or italic is allowed. An h3 just renders it exactly as it is. So I can see that attributes should be done better, but there’s no simple solution. It’s workable for the time being. Perhaps it could be altered bit by bit later on?
Edit: Hey! This is comment 101!
Last edited by zero (2008-08-12 21:59:15)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
I’ve changed the attributes from h3 to h5 so that styling can be added to it. It will only be used for tags, hopefully. I tried sans-serif but it was inconsistent with the rest and looked bad, so it’s 1.1em serif.
I’ve also added links to Glossary and Attributes Cross Reference in all tag articles, seeing as there were links before. Also made all tag articles more consistent. That’s all I’m doing on tags.Offline
#100 2008-08-13 10:13:18
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Sweeeeet. Back on this page, under ‘Attributes’, in FF3 it looks like this:
id=“The id assigned to the article you are looking for comments status for”
Article ID
What’s the ‘Article ID’ related to, in the <p> under the <h5>? Is that teling me that the thing in quotes above should be an article ID? Seems a bit ‘stuck on’ now under all that bold stuff. Maybe it just needs punctuation or a couple more words to make it look like it’s not a mistake :-)
Last edited by Bloke (2008-08-13 10:14:24)
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#101 2008-08-13 10:32:26
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
You’ve picked one of about four articles with similar short descriptions, Stef! Check some other articles and you’ll see that the p does indeed relate to the h5 above it, as it should do semantically, and also I made it ‘stuck on’ so there wasn’t confusion which might occur because of double line spacing and there being a list of attributes.
I don’t know what article ID means either. In case anyone thinks I should now be an expert on tags, I’m afraid I just copy, paste, alter, see code and letters and haven’t tried to understand any of it. Just wanted to get a job done.
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#102 2008-08-13 13:43:21
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Code tag sizing etc is looking good here. I’m noticing some weird vertical alignment issues which I think are due to the paragraph spacing being too close to the line height. Might just need to bump up spacing between paragraphs. Here’s a pic:
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#103 2008-08-13 14:07:28
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#104 2008-08-13 14:16:19
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Much better.
Regarding getting everything on the server and etc. I’m going to be away this weekend are you cool with waiting until next week to do that stuff? Don’t really want to dump you on the server if I won’t be around to help.
Last edited by hakjoon (2008-08-13 14:16:50)
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#105 2008-08-13 14:34:53
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Sure. If you can let me know the server paths such as users/textbook/public_html , I can get the paths ready in the one or two files that need it. Then it’s a case of ftp-ing it across. Alternatively, after I’ve changed the paths I can email the whole thing to you with instructions of what goes where (very easy) and you could install it at your leisure.
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#106 2008-08-13 20:01:12
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
- If H2 must be underlined, can the top-margin be increased to separate it more from preceding text?
- the all-dotted border around the code looked better (instead of the current solid line at the bottom)
- attributes look much better now that the space between attribute and description has been removed. Great!
- navigation within the tag namespace doesn’t show the current page (in the ‘see also’ part at the top), which makes the navigation move around whenever you go to a different page. Drives me nuts.
- h3 font-size looks better if lowered to 100%. It’s currently too similar to the h2 size.
I’m wondering if instead of showing attributes like this:
time=“time”
Restrict to articles posted within specified timeframe. Available values: past, future, or any (both past and future). Default is past.pgonly=“boolean”
Do the article count, but do no display anything. Used when you want to show a search result count, or article navigation tags before the list of articles. Just Make sure that, other than pgonly, both article tags are identical (form-related attributes are the exception, they do not need to be assigned). Default is 0 (no).
It would be more structured if it were done like this (clearly separating possible values, defaults and description of that it is) although styling no doubt could use some love:
time
- value: past, future, any
- default: past
- description: Restrict to articles posted within specified timeframe.
pgonly
- value: boolean
- default: 0
- description: do the article count, but do no display anything. Used when you want to show a search result count, or article navigation tags before the list of articles. Just Make sure that, other than pgonly, both article tags are identical (form-related attributes are the exception, they do not need to be assigned).
Especially for attributes that can have boolean and sort values, this makes it possible to have the explanation of what boolean is and what magic tricks you can do with sorting, can all be grouped together on a single page (yes, I’ve been looking at how W3C shows html specifications), so they don’t have to be repeated for each tag that allows those attributes. Keeps the tag pages more compact.
Stuff I’d love to see removed:
- attribute cross reference… come on, does anyone wake up in the morning think “hmm, I want to use an attribute ‘sort’ today, let’s find a fun tag that supports it”
- tags for pages, conditional tags, tags for forms.
- Instead on a single page (similar to alphabetic) group them by function (similar to the organizational HTML reference).
- The explanation about what forms, pages are that belongs in ‘basics’ (if it isn’t there already) instead of in a reference.
- The explanation of tag nesting would fit nicely in a new page about tag syntax along with an explanation of how to quote attributes, escape sequences in attribute values, attribute value parsing, conditional/container/self-closed tags (I’d be more than happy to contribute content for that page, especially for 4.0.7)
- tags in development. The individual tag pages have already have a genealogy part. Listing development tags makes little sense because until release anything can change (and is listed in the HISTORY.txt file on SVN). Before release, pages for new tags can be prepared anyway as I understand it and be linked upon release.
Since we’re getting closer to a 4.0.7 release, I was thinking: why not keep the old textbook until 4.0.7 release. This has the advantage of being able to prepare TXB pages in the new TXB for the changes in that new TXP version.
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#107 2008-08-13 21:07:57
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Only just caught up with this long thread and have not read it all – please forgive me if I ask something that has already been answered. It looks quite nice and well-organized and I like the multi-column more organised intro page and tag overview page, the lack of the sidebar plus the elastic width.
There are a lot of language options along the top, many of which (sometimes most) don’t lead to the expected results. Maybe that is because not all the content has been transferred. Would it not be simpler to display only those languages where there is corresponding content (e.g. display:none; all of the languages which do not apply) for the respective page? I appreciate you’ve used them as a sort of design-element with the leaning (i) to make a sort of bookshelf (though it is actually the ‘holes’ in the bookshelf that contain content in other languages).
Since we’re getting closer to a 4.0.7 release, I was thinking: why not keep the old textbook until 4.0.7 release
I haven’t followed whether or not both textbooks are to co-exist at all (potentially confusing) so ruud’s idea sounds like a good break point.
A couple of tiny quibbles (sorry, you’ve been hearing them from all sides):
- Clicking on the logo returns a 404 instead of returning to home.
- perhaps a little more padding above the footer as it is hard up against the bottom text.
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#108 2008-08-14 00:45:45
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Peter,
don’t forget to add the link I posted here
Also, looking at this old post, it seems that tag txp:feed_link can also be used as a container tag.
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