[tei-council] new formatting of web version of Guidelines

Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula at kcl.ac.uk
Sun Sep 16 08:51:47 EDT 2007


I think my view has been misunderstood...I didn't mean to say that the 
current site was too clean, but that the version I had seen without CSS 
was too clean. The work done by James, Dot, Sebastian and whoever has 
been involved is great!

My detailed comments for possible improvements below:

- Table of contents: do we need to have the button for displaying the 
full list? wouldn't it be better to have expand/collapse buttons on each 
item? I think it's more economical and more usable (your normally want 
to expand something specific not the whole thing).

- General navigation: I agree with Dan that the menu on the right is a 
bit awkward.
I wander whether we could combine some breadcrumbs at the top with one 
or two navigation bars on the side. So the breadcrumbs would allow you 
to go back to the home or table of contents; while the navigation bar on 
the left would show the contens of the current chapter and the ones on 
the right would be more contextualized and allow you to browse between 
previous and next section and eventually top or bottom of the page.
I am not sure how much the guidelines need to be integrated with the 
whole site. If they do need to, an overarching horizontal bar may also 
be needed.
Breadcrumbs would be useful everywhere not juts in the chapters. e.g. 
how do you get from the table of content to the homepage?
The boxes for navigation work well in the chapters but not as well in 
the specs where they take room and squeeze the tables.
- I think at the bottom of each chapter instead of having:
  ⇑ Contents ⇐ Previous chapter ⇒ Next chapter

we should have:
Contents ⇑  Previous chapter ⇐   ⇒ Next chapter

- Captions for figures need styling and some more room is needed for 
figures.

- There are some problems with the printable version. Characters get all 
squeezed up.

- Specs: I think I prefer to see the children grouped by module. I also 
wander whether a list would work better here than a continous string. I 
suppose we could also have the option to see the children alphabetically.
   - the column with the attribute name sometimes overwrite the column 
with the description in my laptop monitor e.g. 
http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/P5/Guidelines-web-beta/en/html/ref-att.global.html
Same happens with datatype and values.

- Visual design: I realise the focus of this effort was to make the site 
more functional and I think it succeeded, but I wander whether we can 
also make it more appealing with some simple visual design.
   e.g.
   - Home page: instead of having three or more items in the list under 
'version of the guidelines' we could have buttons (HTML, PDF). I like 
the idea of the most popular sections by the way.
   - the arrangement of the table of contents page is a bit awkward. I 
like the two columns but front/back matter could be aligned better
   - Specs: we could use a colour scheme to make evident the separation 
between attribute names/values/notes
   - I like green a lot but the yellow of the logo, the blue of the 
headings, the red of the arrows in footnotes and the green of the footer 
is a bit gaudy to me.

I like what has been done, these are just notes for possible 
improvements and not criticism.

Arianna

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
>> Perhaps you are, or perhaps I am misunderstanding something. What I mean
>> is if the button says, show rnc, then I'm presumably looking at the rng
>> version; could we have that fact noted somewhere?
>>   
> oh, i see what you mean. James, your camp, I reckon
>> My preference would be for a series of radio buttons as Syd suggests (I
>> think), with the different options:
>>
>> o RNC
>> o RNG
>>   
> yes, fair request.
> 

-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cch



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