[kdewebdev-site] Proposed design elements

[Eric Laffoon]

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Hi all,
Recently Chris Hornbaker sent me a proposal of some code to manage particular 
aspects of the site. For those of you who don't know Chris has been involved 
with Quanta helping us focus on XML technologies and this is his aspect of 
the project. He also worked on Quanta's docs. In short, he's rather prolific 
in his contributions to the project. Sort of a white tornado. ;-)

Because I'm rather busy and expect to have more time next week and because I 
think this deserves discussion I want to make his proposal available for 
review and feedback. I have not fully reviewed it but I want to make a few 
statements about it. First off there are things I do and don't like about it. 
However it looks like it is fairly modular. I'm sure Chris will correct me if 
I'm wrong here. The basic aspects of it are:
1) It derives from the design on kde.org for translation abilities
2) It has some classes for handling menus and making sure they adhere to 
compliant design and accessability.

Because XHTML is Chris' area of expertise I'm sure he'll be involved a lot in 
the site. My initial concerns are as follows.
TRANSLATION
This is an interesting design. Initially I was concerned if it was too complex 
but at the same time it can be difficult to abstract out content. Ideally we 
would have the alternate option to simply have abstracted content files in 
different language directories. They would not have to be simply plain text 
if we had a framework designed. In fact Chris's proposal is compelling but it 
does require that all strings that must be translated are packaged like this. 
Once you get past that it's great. Getting past that is therefore one 
question for discussion. Another is my curiosity about translators. Do we 
have people already interested in this. I would certainly not want to rule it 
out and do a limited design but I'm also curios what the support level will 
be. I'm sure it's not totally representative either, I'm just curios.

MENUS
My initial concern looking at this is that we might want to make things 
function more streamlined. Also, my general preference is to create menu 
include files with the intelligence to see where they are and such and just 
drop them on the page.

GENERAL
Who is Bobby and why is he getting so much free advertising? ;-)
However valid my preference is to display as little preference as possible and 
generally show W3C only. Of course if there is a reason to do differently...

I was going to post this up on the site but as it's small enough to be 
included I'll attach it. I'm sure Chris will have comments and I hope others 
do too. I will certainly make a decision where one needs to be made, but my 
preference is that the people working on this project will have some degree 
of consensus which means I don't have to make a decision because it's made by 
consensus. Feel free to speak your mind, politely of course. ;-)

The file is attached.
- -- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://kdewebdev.org  eric at kdewebdev.org
Mailing list - http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/quanta
GPG Fingerprint: 48FB 218D 747F A54A 319D EE98 4A25 794E A453 004B
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