Re: Random question: GNUStep site design

[MJ Ray]

Yes, the link you gave is the plain.  The main other thing that I 
think needs more thought is how the site should be structured and how 
we should promote GNUstep in general.

On 2003-07-20 21:22:22 +0100 Scott Stevenson <address@hidden> wrote:
> [...] Is the revamp something you  personally want to do or something 
> you feel you have to do?

More that I want to.

> [...] The problems were simple -- just  misnamed selectors/properties.

Oh yeah, that's a fix for a cockup of mine.  I rather stupidly merged 
the CSS before retemplating, which let to interesting side-effects on 
the current site, so I introduced some typos to stop the selectors 
matching.  Sorry!  I forgot about that.  I'll create a template dir 
and put working copies in there soon.  Well-caught on text-color, 
though!

> MacIE5 is another story. It has this interesting "behavior" that  
> basically boils down to this:
>         If these conditions are met for a given CSS box (div container):
>                 1: The box contains block-level display elements
>                 2. The box has an undefined width

There is no undefined width.  It is auto.

> 	... the box will not automatically scale to the minimum size 
> required  for its content.
>         Instead, it will grow to the maximum size allowed by its parent.

It is meant to be the intrinsic width, not the maximum.

>         Additionally, if a third condition is met:
>                 3. The box is set to positon: absolute
> 	The box boundaries will actually be too big for the canvas, and  
> trigger the browser's horizontal scrollbar.
>
> Applying these rules to the site results in:
> http://createbynumbers.com/downloads/gnustep/macie-before.jpg

I hate IE because we can't fix cockups like that.  (I hate Opera for 
similar reasons.)

> The MacIE folks felt they wre following the W3C specs in at least the 
>  first two conditions, although there have been comments from them 
> about  ambiguiouty in the spec.
>
> The trigger in the case of common.css is the display:block 
> declaration  for the div#menu child elements. I'm not sure what you 
> want to do about  this, if anything. The easiest approach would be to 
> set some sort of  width on div#menu, but that has drawbacks, of 
> course.

Yes, like having to pray that the font is reasonably close to the one 
that I am using when designing, that the longest line is something 
like the same number of ems.  Not acceptable, IMO.

The current CSS design came about to fix a breakage of IE5/Win.  
Wonderful that IE5/Mac is differently broken and it doesn't look 
possible to satisfy both while having a fully-working design.

> > If we take
> > enough can you licence them under GPL or something suitable (PD  
> > whatever)?
> > Then, I think we'll give you a link from a credits and copyright 
> > page.
> PD is probably the easiest. GPL would be fine too, but in practice 
> I'm  not sure there's much difference when you're dealing with a web 
> page.  It's hard to deteremine what derivative works really are.

Possibly.

Can you subscribe to gnustep-webmasters and discuss this there?  I 
think others may have views on this.

--
MJR/slef   My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
     http://mjr.towers.org.uk/   jabber://address@hidden
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Thought: Edwin A Abbott wrote about trouble with Windows in 1884