[Python-Dev] Playing with a new theme for the docs (original) (raw)

Glenn Linderman v+python at g.nevcal.com
Thu Mar 22 20:50:09 CET 2012

On 3/22/2012 10:02 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

As they say, the 99% who are lousy designers give the rest a bad name. wink

:)

My first impression of this page:

http://www.python.org/~gbrandl/build/html/index.html was that the grey side-bar gives the page a somber, perhaps even dreary, look. First impressions count, and I'm afraid that first look didn't work for me.

The dark sidebar continued down the whole page, and made it clearer why that space was being wasted at the bottom of long pages... I had never noticed, until doing the side-by-side comparison, that it was possible to collapse the TOC sidebar, but this seems to be true only in the old layout.

After looking at both a while, my suggestions would be:

  1. Preserve the collapsability of the TOC, but possible enhance its recognizability with an X in the upper right of the TOC sidebar, as well as the << in the middle.

  2. Make the header fixed, so that the bread crumb trail at the top is available even after scrolling way down a long page.

  3. Make the sidebar separately scrollable, so that it stays visible when scrolling down in the text. This would make it much easier to jump from section to section, if the TOC didn't get lost in the process.

I have no particular preferences for colors or background colors, as long as they are reasonably legible. I do have a preference for serif fonts, especially if the font gets small. Can anyone point me to any legibility studies that show any font being more legible, more easily readable, than Times Roman? (And yes, I know a lot of people that dislike Times Roman, and none of them ever have.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20120322/443c0151/attachment.html>

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