kawa web-site changes

kawa web-site changes

[Per Bothner]

I've been working on some changes to the Kawa home-page to
make it less cluttered, "punchier", and generally more appealing.

Please take a look at http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/index.html
and compare it to http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ .

The main focus for now is on the left button-bar (or top button-bar
if on a narrow window).  I want to have just the essential buttons,
especially on the home page, to make it obvious where to get started.

I may do some style tweaks with the buttons, such as putting some
space between the (top-level) buttons.

Let me know if you think I have the right set of buttons, if the order
could be improved, and if the text is appropriate.  The web page is still
mostly generated from doc/kawa.texi, so the simplest way to re-order
button entries to is to re-order parts of kawa.texi, which is what
I've done.

A possible misfeature: If you select a section-level page (e.g.
Reference Documentation -> Characters and text -> Strings) then the
other chapter-level pages are not shown in the menu bar.  Is that
a feature or a bug?

I'm also working on the "Features" page.  I want to get rid of all of
the paragraphs starting with "Kawa <verb> ....".  Instead I want phrasing
that has the feature more up-front, and is "punchier".

This is a work-on progress, and suggestions are welcome.  Much of the
text on the Features page is quite old, and may be about features that
are no longer as interesting.  What do you think are the high-value features
of Kawa, and how would you phrase each in a 1-3 sentence paragraph?

You may notice a minor tweak: The synopsis line for a Procedure, Syntax,
or Predicate now has parentheses around them.  For example in:
http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/Paths.html
This is done using CSS styling, so the parens don't show up if you
copy-and-paste - or diable CSS styling.  It might be better to add the parens
using XSL.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: kawa web-site changes

[Per Bothner]

Please take another look at http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/index.html
and compare it to http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ .

Note there have *not* been a lot of changes to the actual contents (text)
since the previous "beta".  What I am looking for feedback is in
layout/styling and organization.  At this point it works reasonably well,
and is at least an improvement over the old version on gnu.org:
The home page especially is much less cluttered (too much so?),
and it should hopefully be easier to find what you're looking for.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: kawa web-site changes

[Per Bothner]

On 11/10/2014 01:00 PM, Per Bothner wrote:
> Please take another look at http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/index.html
> and compare it to http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ .

Jamison Hope pointed out problems with browsing on an iPhone - which
I verified on our Android phones:

The logic for switching to single column mode doesn't work on phone browsers
(either Mobile Safari or Google Chrome on iPhone; Firefox or Chrome on Android).

The code would check if the window with is less than 700.  The problem is that the window size
as reported by JavaScript is 980 - bigger than the physical screen size.  The solution
is to also check screen.window.availWidth.

I updated  http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/style/utils.js with this fix.
Please try the web-site on various devices and browsers.

An annoyance is that when you navigate to a page you have to scroll page all the links.
I don't know a good solution for that.  An alternative might be an explicit button
to show or hide the navigation bar.  I just discovered DocBook WebHelp, which does that:

http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/webhelp/docs/index.html

(DocBook WebHelp is conceptually similar to Kawa's web site, with an addition
that they generate a search index, which can be used off-line.  If this project
was available when I re-did the Kawa web site I would probably have used it.)
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/

Re: kawa web-site changes

[Jamison Hope]

On Nov 10, 2014, at 8:16 PM, Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> wrote:

> On 11/10/2014 01:00 PM, Per Bothner wrote:
>> Please take another look at http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/index.html
>> and compare it to http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ .
> 
> Jamison Hope pointed out problems with browsing on an iPhone - which
> I verified on our Android phones:
> 
> The logic for switching to single column mode doesn't work on phone browsers
> (either Mobile Safari or Google Chrome on iPhone; Firefox or Chrome on Android).
> 
> The code would check if the window with is less than 700.  The problem is that the window size
> as reported by JavaScript is 980 - bigger than the physical screen size.  The solution
> is to also check screen.window.availWidth.
> 
> I updated  http://per.bothner.com/tmp/kawa/style/utils.js with this fix.
> Please try the web-site on various devices and browsers.

The updated utils.js appears to work to move the links to the top.  It also
changes the color scheme (no more colored background), is that intentional?

> An annoyance is that when you navigate to a page you have to scroll page all the links.
> I don't know a good solution for that.  An alternative might be an explicit button
> to show or hide the navigation bar.  I just discovered DocBook WebHelp, which does that:
> 
> http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/webhelp/docs/index.html
> 
> (DocBook WebHelp is conceptually similar to Kawa's web site, with an addition
> that they generate a search index, which can be used off-line.  If this project
> was available when I re-did the Kawa web site I would probably have used it.)

Perhaps have anchor tags at the start of the text, and make the incoming links
point to those rather than to the top of each html page?  Not sure whether
something like that would play nice with the way the Kawa pages get generated.


--
Jamison Hope
The PTR Group
www.theptrgroup.com