[wiki] A New Textbook

uli · 2008-08-11 21:30:01

Peter, the language links work as before, i.e. they still don’t get you back to English, sorry. (Language links don’t work at all at the moment, I think you’ll be working on them)

The foreign links with strange characters I found here at the bottom. No chance for me to check for more at the moment.

Re colors: In your link color scheme the dark orange is the one color closest to the red of the current official textbook. Red was used for links without translation/incomplete(?). So the color scheme is a little misleading, I think, at least for me. Like Ruud I’d also opt for good old TXP-brown links.
Personally, I don’t see a sense coloring these signs <:=.../> (class=“sy0”). Furthermore, at least on my monitor, they’re too light to really contrast the beige (yes, beige here ;). And they’d lead to easily ignoring small but important characters like semi-colons, hyphens, and colons. But also class=“kw1” gives an accentuation where none belongs, for odd examples see here.
So, all in all, I think the colors here complicate the correct, distinct reception of the code.

zero · 2008-08-11 21:53:45

OK, I had to go into Windows for the first time for 4 months which was when I switched to Ubuntu. I think I’ve fixed the Safari and IE problems now. Please let me know if there’s still a problem.

Uli, if I go to textpattern semantic model in English, I see there is a German equivalent so I click on DE and see it in German. I can still click EN and return to the English version. It works with all similar things with me. What browser are you using, perhaps there’s a difference?

I’ve gone back to brown links, and it doesn’t look too bad, actually. Perhaps I had a different colour combination last time that made it look bad. I also changed the background to very very pale beige. Are the colours OK with that? Having said that I just clicked on the link Uli gave and the yellow and green are hard to discern. I’m with Uli on this that we’d be better without those code colours, but I could change the colours no doubt although I haven’t figured out where the styling is for them yet.

Re the stange language characters, I see now. Actually those Do Not Delete links can be deleted because they lead to no actual translations and even if they did people should get in the habit of clicking the language links at the top. I don’t think they are anything to worry about at the moment. I’ll sort them out sometime.

uli · 2008-08-11 22:23:47

Peter, lang links do work now as expected, home link is repaired, brown for links and light BG color for code are better: thumbs up.

Last edited by uli (2008-08-11 22:26:03)

uli · 2008-08-11 23:18:03

The globe icon for external link should go after the link, where probably everyone is used to find it (see any wiki). Here the globes actually become a bulleted list.
Also, the globe doesn’t speak for itself like the well-known arrow pointing out of a page symbol.

Performing a search: The grey color used for the normal text is way too light, almost unreadable, even with dimmed light. It should be at least the tone of the nav links “BASICS/HOW TO” etc. if not black. The accentuations for the found term could be coloured if you think the current grey is too subtle with a darker font color.

hakjoon · 2008-08-12 00:38:21

Checking things out on my mac at home.

A lot of the font-sizes are dropping below 10px which makes them very small. This is noticeable if you use a browser which does not set a minimum font-size or turn off the minimum font-size in Firefox (or browser of choice).

In camino the table of contents on an individual page and the code snippets are really hard to read. In Safari the fonts don’t get anti-aliased because they are so small making them even harder to read.

I think it’s just an issue of the UL cascade being a pain with the relative sizes.

zero · 2008-08-12 10:20:36

Uli, I never did like that globe anyway so thanks for your suggestions. OK now?

And I made search results readable. Well spotted.

Patrick, yes it was ul cascade and initial TOC being set to 80%. Is it OK now? Or does it occur anywhere else besides TOC?

I’d like to sort out the code colours. Should I turn them off? Personally I think the code is more readable without colours, and Uli agrees, and possibly Patrick also prefers it without colours too. To change the colours it means hacking these files and possibly others too. Anyone care to do it?

php-brief.php
php.php
css.php

Even with background white, code is not particularly readable.

Last edited by zero (2008-08-12 11:43:23)

thebombsite · 2008-08-12 13:36:19

I am with Patrick on some of the font-sizes but then you probably expected me to be didn’t you Peter? I don’t set minimum font sizes in my browsers either. I like to see sites the way they were designed then magnify them if necessary with “Ctrl +”. Anyway I am looking at this page and for me the code font is too small. I think if it were a little larger it might also help with the “colouring” though I also agree that code is probably more readable as a single colour. I can also see on that page that simple text is being coloured. In this line:-

<p>Comments are turned off for this article.</p>

the word “for” is yellow.

I don’t think anyone would be really insistent on code-colouring for a reference site of this type. I could be wrong of course. ;)

hakjoon · 2008-08-12 13:40:52

TOC looks good, code samples are still rendering at about 9.5px changing the font-size in pre from 100% to 1.1em kicks it up at least above 10px.

Are the style rules hard coded in those files?

Bloke · 2008-08-12 13:47:27

While I can’t speak for all coders (I’m a curious mix: a half-ass coder with a biiig user hat in the cupboard) I’d say the syntax highlighting is more hassle than its worth in Textbook.

When coding in text editors, sure, colours are great but each coder prefers their own scheme so you can’t possibly please us all here. Some even like coding in green-on-black or (even worse) white-on-blue like the old MS DOS editors. Bleurgh. So I’m with the opinions expressed so far on this one: increase the font size a tad and ditch the colours if you can; just have the code block with a subtle background colour and/or border to separate it and I’m a happy bunny.

Last edited by Bloke (2008-08-12 13:48:47)

zero · 2008-08-12 14:22:14

Thanks, folks, looks like we’re all agreeing on this one.
I’ve taken the code colours away, not sure if all of them, but hopefully.

For the code I have this: {font: normal 1.1em “courier new”, courier, monospace;}
For inline code I have this {font: bold 1.1em “courier new”, courier, monospace; } I had a background colour on inline code for a while but have removed it for readability reasons. It’s difficult because it is OK for some articles but not for others.

Is the font size now OK? Mac users, which monospace font do you normally use?

My stylesheet is adapted from the default, so I keep changing it as necessary but there are things overriding and things I don’t understand yet, so I’m taking it bit by bit because I don’t want to change something and then find it’s affecting other things. But we’re getting there :-)

Bloke · 2008-08-12 14:43:52

Much more readable without the colour. Nice. The <pre> font still looks a tad small on Firefox 2 here. Note to self: upgrade one day.

btw, looking at the the page the bombsite mentioned earlier, have you any idea how to add more whitespace around (specifically below) the code blocks? It appears a teensy bit cramped to me. I tried:

pre {
  margin-bottom:2em;
}

which sort of worked but some of the dotted borders disappeared under the <h3> tags. Varying the amount of margin gave limited degrees of success; sometimes it removed the dotted border below <pre> tags that butted up to <p> tags; sometimes only when they were adjacent to other <hN> tags. It’s all very confusing.

Regardless, some amount of whitespace below, or even to the sides by an em or two, might just make the document seem less claustrophobic. Yes I’m nitpicking now and may well start quoting the designers’ rules of proximity, sorry. You’re doing a sterling job.

Y’know, I’m sure about 80% of a typical implementation goes into pissing around with CSS rules to make stuff look right across major browsers. Think of how much time us developers would save if all browsers could render stuff right first time! *dreams*

Last edited by Bloke (2008-08-12 14:45:54)

hakjoon · 2008-08-12 15:44:58

Font-size is looking teeny tiny on FF3 too. I think the issue is it’s not actually in a code block. It’s actually pre.code.

I did kind of like the borders around the code samples so you could easily distinguish the code bits from just text but I’m ok without if people didn’t like them.

Bloke said:
Y’know, I’m sure about 80% of a typical implementation goes into pissing around with CSS rules to make stuff look right across major browsers. Think of how much time us developers would save if all browsers could render stuff right first time! dreams

But then I wouldn’t have a job :)

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#73 2008-08-11 21:30:01

Re: [wiki] A New Textbook

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