Re: GNUstep Site Redesign

[Jesse Ross]

> Firstly, that sounds like "Mystery Meat navigation" to me
> http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html
> - for example, I'd never noticed the Savannah pop-out menus before
> and I'm a member of a few projects there.  There's nothing to indicate
> those submenus exist before they pop-out.
>
> Secondly, GNUstep menus don't pop-out on hover, for good reason IMO.
> One alternative is to make it look like GNUstep menus, with arrows and
> so on, but when I trialled a design which looked/felt like the GNUstep
> menu, it was pretty heavily flamed, so I doubt using pop-out menus
> would be popular.
>
> Finally, Savannah's menus don't use Javascript and nor should ours.
> But this is possible with CSS only (maybe with a little JS fix for IE)
> if you want to do it.
>
> I could be wrong, of course, but be cautious if you go that way.

I think (assuming I understand what Stefan is wanting), that it would  
be okay, as long as it's merely a way of more quickly drilling deeper  
within the site, and we still have the regular navigation system  
we've set up. Facebook is a good example to follow here: http:// 
www.facebook.com/


Using your idea of a visual indicator (also used on Facebook), we  
might have top-level nav that looks like this:

Where 'Get Started', 'Development' and 'Support' have drop-downs,  
because they have deeper "sections" that warrant using a shortcut, as  
opposed to pages like News or Applications where most of what you  
want is right up front.

When clicking on the Development link directly, you'd be sent to the  
development page, which would have all the content we discussed  
before: Documentation, Tools, Tutorials, Manuals, Roadmap, etc., all  
laid out with their own compartments (screenshot to come later).

However if you just want to get to the Documentation section of  
Development, you could just click on the expander arrow, and get a  
list like so:

I think that that solves the problem of how to get to common content  
quickly, while still allowing for the regular nav we've set up.


J.