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LG to get a makeover and wants your help

LG will be getting a facelift in the next month or two. A stylesheet, revamped headers/footers, and perhaps a few more images. My biggest pet peeve of the current layout is all the the extra whitespace the browsers put around headers and <HR>s (horizontal separators). Stylesheets make it possible to squeeze out all that space, allowing more content to show on the first screenful. Non-stylesheet browsers would still have the whitespace, but at least they'd be no worse off than they are now.

I'm actually thinking about an article header something like this:

-----------------------------------------------------------
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO   Home > issue 77 (April 2002)      |
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO          Title Title Title          |
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO          Title Title Title          |
|   LG LOGO   LG LOGO              by Author              |
|   making Linux ... more fun    (e-mail link)            |
-----------------------------------------------------------

I also aim to revamp the navigation links between pages, to cut down on questions like "Why doesn't LG get a search engine or an index of all issues?" (It already has them.) Or, "How do I send a question to The Answer Gang? Oh wait, I didn't know there was an Answer Gang, so I just sent it to gazette. I looked on the author info page, but I'm still not sure where to send my News Bytes entry." All these links are available... if you know where to look. Making the links more findable in the places people are likely to look will be the goal.

The Answer Gang and I are looking for some more images to decorate the site with. Don't worry--we're sticking to our "minimum graphics" philosophy. Just loosening it up a bit. The success of the various cartoon series in LG over the past year shows that we can increase the size of LG slightly without incurring the wrath of those who find 200 KB an expensive download.

So, to Leon Czechowicz and all those who have been asking Why we stay plain when we could look Really Cool, now's your chance. Send in your suggestions, images, HTML fragments, stylesheet fragments, navigation flowcharts and wishlist items to gazette@ssc.com. How would you like LG to look? We'll probably make a decision (or start to think about when to make a decision) around April 15th, so the sooner the better, or at least send us an e-mail so we know something is coming. Any ideas or examples we like but don't use we'll put into an article, so at least they'll get some exposure.

Those who follow LG closely know our general policies for layout. I've tried to articulate them below, but no doubt have forgotten something or other.

• The site must be completely static so that it can be read from mirrors with unknown webserver software, and from CD-ROMs and FTP files where there is no webserver.
• Each issue tries to be > 2 MB, and the number of shared files should grow only modestly. This is for people with slow modems, or who pay per minute or per megabyte for downloads.
• It must look OK and navigate OK on a wide variety of browsers, both graphical and text.
• The page width is normally 600 pixels, but may expand to 630 or 750 occasionally. The layout must look good anywhere from 600-750.
• Images should be PNG (preferred) or JPG (not GIF due to patent restrictions). Use a white background, no transparency (Netscape displays PNGs with transparent pixels as solid boxes), and no animation. Maximum image size should be around 200x100, something we can put around a header or next to a paragraph.
• Stylesheets: There will be one global stylesheet for all articles, TOC pages and the home page. (Perhaps we'll use mixin stylesheets down the road, but that's later.)
• Javascript, frames and sidebars are anathema. Javascript may be considered in very limited circumstances, such as to submit a form when pressing Enter in a text field. That provides a slight convenience to the Javascript user but no degradation to the non-Javascript user. But any Javascript must be functional rather than just cosmetic.
• No tables around the article text! Keep layout tables to a minimum. (I'll have to use a table for the article header though, since non-stylesheet browsers can't do style columnizing.)
• I think we'll be switching to text buttons for the navigation links rather than graphical buttons. In a table with colored cell backgrounds, unless we find a style strategy that's suitable and looks OK on non-style browsers. Not only do text buttons download faster, but they're easier to change later.

So put on your thinking caps and send in some ideas.

Happy Linuxing!

Mike ("Iron") Orr
Editor, Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com

Copyright © 2002, the Editors of Linux Gazette.
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Published in Issue 77 of Linux Gazette, April 2002