Re: [boost] New boost webpage

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-08-07 23:10:19

On Sun, 07 Aug 2005 20:25:43 -0400, Beth Jacobson wrote
> Marcin Kalicinski wrote:
> > There is a fairly estabilished standard on how links should look in
> > "professional" sites. This is either "normally underlined" text in different
> > colour, or nonunderlined text in different colour that changes colour when
> > pointed by mouse. Microsoft.com, google.com, ibm.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com,
> > nytimes.com, you name it, all stick to it. Deviating from that makes me say
> > it looks non professional enough for boost.
> > 
> > 
> >>>Additionally, I'd
> >>>rather have links in boxes on the right have the same style as links in
> >>>the
> >>>text.
> 
> If I might add my two cents, I agree with the above. I like the look 
> of the page a lot, but the link style is confusing and counter-
> intuitive. This makes it a poor introduction to the Boost Libraries. 
>
>...snip details...
> 
> Finally, and much less important. it might be nice to have a 
> different link color for visited links, at least in the text and 
> perhaps for the menu as well. Especially for someone exploring the 
> libraries for the first time, it's nice to have a visual cue to tell 
> you where you've already been.

Ok, I've been sitting quietly on the webpage for awhile ;-) I agree with the
other posters here -- I don't like the new link color either.  Too subtle and
'non-standard'.  I assume the idea was to make the text more readable, which
is a noble goal.  The observation that followed links aren't different is a
big deal to me, though. It's a usability problem that somehow I failed to
notice and I consider a big problem for new users...

> > Also, on my
> > machine mouse cursor briefly changes to hourglass when moving on the link.
> > It looks like it was flickering.
> 
> That could be solved by preloading the image with javascript. I 
> noticed there's no js on the page and assume that was by design, but 
> maybe an exception could be made in this case, since there'd be no 
> added penalty for people without js. They'd just be subject to the 
> same hourglass/flickering they've got already.

In the past we've been avoiding the use of Javascript.  The policy rationale
is here:

http://www.boost.org/more/lib_guide.htm#JavaScript

That said, I think we made an exception for the iostreams docs treeview?  In
any case, I think we should be willing to relook at the policy as long as
their is a fallback for browsers that don't support js.

Jeff