Re: Revamp of the www.ietf.org website

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I think there is a stylistic cliff in website design. One kind, the
older kind, uses a simple model of HTML which could be made more
overtly structured (use of id= tags) to make machine processing
simpler, but is in design and intent, a single load.
 * Its highly cacheable.
 * It makes little or no use of client-side drivers to direct
point-and-click because embedded URLs are literals, not
machine-generated on the fly.
 * It trivially meets vision impaired or voice-translation goals.
 * It trivially can be translated

It has one major drawback: a lot of people think its ugly.

The newer kind, the responsive reactive javascript kind, is far
simpler to navigate for anyone used to that template driven design, it
has a number of behaviours which in CHI terms a lot of people are
clued into and will react well to. It looks nice.

I think we've got ourselves caught on a cusp. The older kind suits
people who want to use the IETF web to conduct work, are in the
system, and have little concern for aesthetics. I think most of this
is met by the datatracker and like sites. That said, its a pain to
have to move to a different URL to get this kind of outcome for anyone
who is using the current site.

The new one is better suited to a world where we're trying to sell
something, or convince somebody. I can't help feeling this is one of
those 'what were we fighting for?' moments, if we feel we have to
adopt an aesthetic, distinct from operate a portal in our own
interest.

Do I think its possible we could use more modern responsive, js
enabled, template driven methods to update a website we run for our
own interest? I am not sure. I note that the things which I actually
USE on a day-to-day level like gitlabs, github, have really low levels
of use of this kind of feature to conduct work, and mostly it relates
to user-administration or introspection functions, of the site itself:
the primary role, to catalog and list artifacts under change and track
their differences and submissions, is pretty bereft of markup of THIS
kind. It has other markup, colorizing, denotation of state, which is
obviously using CSS and JS somehow.

isn't that actually close to what we want? Aren't we actually closer
to github, a wiki, and a calendar, than anything else?

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 7:25 AM, Martin Rex <mrex@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>>
>> Screenshot from my screen:
>>
>> http://imgur.com/a/iJCLV
>
> Here is what the sites look like on my mobile phone:
>
> https://beta.ietf.org  ->  http://imgur.com/a/gFJLe
>
> https://www.ietf.org   ->  http://imgur.com/a/iguEO
>
>
> For me, the https://beta.ietf.org, besides wasting a considerable
> amount of my monthly data volume, is pretty much completely useless,
> whereas the old site comes up quickly, in an extremely familiar fashion,
> and I can easily and quickly zoom into my area of interest.
>
>
> The https://beta.ietf.org is like a toddler coming into a big
> ballroom in search for his parents.  He can not see over tables,
> so he has to run through the entire room around every table to
> check all the chairs for his parents.
>
>
> As an (6"4) adult, I'm more used to looking into a room,
> glancing over all tables without _having_ to run through
> the room.   The https://beta.ietf.org is forcing the
> poor toddlers perspective of the world on me, forces
> me to run through every passage and corner of a poorly
> readable graphical maze, having to pick up every stone
> and look below for what I'm interested in, making me
> wait for the slowly loading page, wasting my mobile
> internet volume, and wasting my time trying to discover
> what is new or (ir)relevant.
>
>
> :-(((((((
>
>
> -Martin
>




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