Re: [Dragora-users] Some issues with the Dragora website

[Michael Siegel]

Am 13.11.19 um 22:10 schrieb Chris F.A. Johnson:
> On Wed, 13 Nov 2019, Michael Siegel wrote:
> 
>> Hello Chris.
>>
>> Am 12.11.19 um 22:49 schrieb Chris F.A. Johnson:
>>> ?? The development version of the site is at https://dragora.cfaj.ca
>>>
>>> ?? Comments and suggestions are welcome.
>>
>> It's nice to see someone is working on this. I like what you did there.
>>
>> Now, if you look at the font-family settings for blockquote, ol and ul,
>> you'll see that they are different from the rest of the text. This
>> doesn't really make sense, does it? I mean, it surely breaks the site's
>> style, in a way, and doesn't exactly aid readability. I think both
>> font-family definitions should just be omitted. I've tried that and
>> think it really looks better.
> 
>    That is on the agenda .....done.

Nice.

>   (Remember, this is a work in progress, modifying the existing CSS
>   file.)

Sure, I wasn't meaning to imply you had introduced the serif font. It
was a leftover from the original CSS file of the current official site.
I should perhaps have made that more clear.

>> Concerning the colors, I would suggest to
>>
>>  * make normal text (basically, everything that is not a link) slightly
>>    darker for better contrast
> 
>    I think it is dark enough, but I'll try it.
> 
>>  * choose a less ?glowy? color for the box frames (Maybe the color for
>>    normal text would be a good choice.)
> 
>   Good idea.
> 
>>  * keep links always underlined and blue/red/purple (except for special
>>    links, e.g., those in the navigation menu), maybe making slight
>>    adjustments to each color
> 
>   I don't like underlining links (except on :hover). I prefer to make
>   them stand out with bold. I saw this on a site several years ago
>   and liked it. It seems to be used fairly often these days.

I have to disagree on that. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any
site that does it like that. But that's subjective, of course. My real
point is that making bold text indicate hyperlinks is not a good idea.

I mean, isn't this breaking a very reasonable standard way of formatting
links for purely cosmetic reasons? I think it is. The problem with that
is that it practically precludes ever using bold text for non-hyperlink
text (if you're aiming for consistency), e.g., to warn people that
`dd`-ing an ISO image to a USB key will [bold]destroy all data[/bold]
still residing on the target device. On the other hand, you'll hardly
ever see the need to underline anything for emphasis in a hypertext
document because there's italic and bold text for that already. And,
well, underlining is really for links.

I've found a reply to a question about making links italic on
ux.stackexchange.com that really hits the nail on the head concerning
italic and bold text as well as underlining links on websites, IMO. So,
here's a link to that:

  https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/14709

>> I've tried a few things and found that #005500 would make for a better
>> readable text color without being too far removed from what you're using
>> now. The headings (h2, h3) were a bit heavy then. But this was easily
>> cured by simply making them #006600. Then, I used #005500 as the border
>> color for the content and navigation link boxes and reduced the border
>> width to 1px. After that, I removed any styling for normal links. And,
>> last but not least, I removed the directive for importing fonts from
>> Google because that's unnecessary, IMO, and I'd rather have the Dragora
>> website not use Google services in any capacity.
> 
>   Google is gone.

Thank you.


Best
--msi