On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 12:48:16 CEST, Caspar Schutijser wrote:
Well, I already do this indeed. But quite often, websites have
limited functionality if I disable JavaScript, and some websites
even manage it to be completely unusable without JavaScript enabled,
even though the website most important functionality is showing
some text. That is stuff I really would like to prevent happening
to the Trojita website.
Yes, I agree, and the option of *requiring* JS for actual important
contents is not on the table. On the other hand, *allowing* the use of JS
to show some additional data like the list of last commits or ML messages
is something which might be nice. The use of JS is not a problem, IMHO, but
loading 3rd party scripts or HTML iframes is something we should talk
about.
Although that might be true, I personally don't really care about
that. Being tracked as little as possible is more important to me
than saving a few kilobytes on bandwidth. An even easier way to
save bandwidth is not having a fancy website at all and instead
just have a relatively simple website, like Trojita has now.
The problem of the current design is that it doesn't work on big screens or
small screens; the font size is too small to be readable (I was told that
today's buzzword for this is "responsive"). The design I got donated from a
webdesigner friend of mine utilizes 3rd party contents, and before I bug
him to spend more of his time on this, I'd like to make sure that there
actually are people who might object to that, hence this mail.
I don't know how other people do it, but if I encounter a website
of a project I never saw before, I always go check out the repository
to see what's happening. So what I do is click on a (for example)
GitHub link myself and checkout what's happening. A widget showing
the latest commits wouldn't be really necessary for me.
Yes, this isn't about necessity. The code for showing a list of commits is
not here yet, either -- it's just one random idea which crossed my mind
when I was reviewing the redesing (it already incorporates some github
buttons).
The issue of manpower is a good point. However, if we keep the site
as simple as possible (like it is now), a lot of manpower is not
needed. If the functionality of the website stays roughly the same,
I don't see why we would have a lot of extra work on maintaining
the website.
Right; but on the other hand, we might have some poeple do this work for us
at no or negligible cost to us. But before I ask them, we have to agree on
whether we mind loading contents from 3rd party sites which might track our
users.
So summarized, my opinion is like this: if we keep things simple,
there is no need to do a lot of work on the website and/or to depend
on other websites.
:). The in-progress redesign I was shown loads some CSS from Google's
website, some JS from some CDN I've never heard about, and embeds a couple
of GitHub iframes. The current (old) version sucks because I cannot read
that text on my cell phone [1]. A friend of mine came up with this original
birthday gift, so I'm trying to prevent any possible blunders like annoying
the developer team by doing something which people would hate.
Cheers,
Jan
[1] Yes, I do use my cell phone's browser to check out FLOSS software every
now and then -- last time when I sat on a presentation and the guy was
using a nice PDF viewer with time-based progress bar at the bottom
--
Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
