<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#330033">
On 3/22/2012 10:02 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4F6B5B33.9020406@pearwood.info" type="cite"><br>
As they say, the 99% who are lousy designers give the rest a bad
name.
<br>
<br>
<b class="moz-txt-star"><span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span>wink<span
class="moz-txt-tag">*</span></b>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
:)<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4F6B5B33.9020406@pearwood.info" type="cite">
My first impression of this page:
<br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.python.org/%7Egbrandl/build/html/index.html">http://www.python.org/~gbrandl/build/html/index.html</a>
<br>
<br>
was that the grey side-bar gives the page a somber, perhaps even
dreary, look. First impressions count, and I'm afraid that first
look didn't work for me.
</blockquote>
<br>
The dark sidebar continued down the whole page, and made it clearer
why that space was being wasted at the bottom of long pages... I
had never noticed, until doing the side-by-side comparison, that it
was possible to collapse the TOC sidebar, but this seems to be true
only in the old layout.<br>
<br>
After looking at both a while, my suggestions would be:<br>
<br>
1. Preserve the collapsability of the TOC, but possible enhance its
recognizability with an X in the upper right of the TOC sidebar, as
well as the << in the middle.<br>
<br>
2. Make the header fixed, so that the bread crumb trail at the top
is available even after scrolling way down a long page.<br>
<br>
3. Make the sidebar separately scrollable, so that it stays visible
when scrolling down in the text. This would make it much easier to
jump from section to section, if the TOC didn't get lost in the
process.<br>
<br>
I have no particular preferences for colors or background colors, as
long as they are reasonably legible. I do have a preference for
serif fonts, especially if the font gets small. Can anyone point me
to any legibility studies that show any font being more legible,
more easily readable, than Times Roman? (And yes, I know a lot of
people that dislike Times Roman, and none of them ever have.)<br>
</body>
</html>