meo@xxxxxxx (2001-05-23 at 1020.16 -0500): > |* The design should be fast and clean. It should support all browsers > | and should not make excesssive use of nested tables or JavaScript. > | The current design of www.gimp.org is OK from that point of view. > | But on the other hand, the GUG site is taking too long to render in > | Netscape 4 (2-3 seconds of delay for re-displaying any page, because > | of the nested tables). > > They should also work if JavaScript is not available. Links > should be links - not JS calls! JS should be avoided, some browsers do not support it, some people just turn it off to avoid the pain, links are links and opening windows as the html coders want is not what i would could say nice, mainly cos they can not cover all font types, screen layouts, etc etc. So please, can anybody show me a JS that is really useful (aka no other way to do it) and works always? > |* The site should not use cookies unless there is a real need for > | them. For example, if the site is built with PHP then it should not > | use the session-id cookies or any other user-tracking cookies. This > | is not needed and it annoys the users who have configured their > | browser to warn them when the server wants to set a cookie. Very true. > |* The pages should be easy to bookmark and the URLs should not be too > | long. This means that frames are forbidden, and the systems that > | generate dynamic contents using horribly long URLs should also be > | avoided (see the bad examples from Corel below). Yes, cos if I post an URL to a friend and it says page.php?id=5 it says nothing, when anim_tut.php says a lot more. Yes, I know, I can describe the link to my friend, but I can also post the wrong one, or just send my friend to a garbage page (you know, some people are in joke mode always), so if the links says something, better. > I work for a software company whose products handle content management, > personalization, etc. [It doesn't run on linux, and it's much more > complex and resource intensive than we need, so I haven't pursued > trying to get a copy.] I've worked on the GUI, in professional services > doing work for clients and in applications. The above points turn out > to be absolutely critical if you want a really useful site for the vast > majority of users - especially if you care about a wide cross-section > of users from techiphobes to technophiles. > > And while I know this is a mind-boggling concept, we should > make sure the pages work even if there is no image delivery. Guess how some people searching a given page browse: without images. Once you have found it, and if images are needed, you load them. And sometimes not at all, searching download places with wget and text browser when ssh to another machine is the last case I have meet (and yes, it was faster than local, go tell router configs). GSR
