[Samba] samba.org has been revised!

[Felix Miata]

On 2010/05/19 12:51 (GMT-0500) John H Terpstra composed:

> I respect your right to have and express your opinions regarding the new
> look of the Samba web site.  I also wish to point out the great freedom
> we have and exercise in the open source community - that of contributing
> something better.  Remember though, that since we are predominately
> consensus-driven, what you I view as best may not meet with unanimous
> agreement from the greater community. This gets us back to respect for
> the right to disagree.

As usual, there has been no feedback from citing a mirror of my opinion by
one of the few competent usability experts accessible to web researchers.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html is not theoretics or
opinion. It's a fact that too small fonts are rampant on the web.

> Seriously, if you have a strong conviction that the Samba project would
> be better served with a different look-and-feel, and a more appropriate
> logical layout, please pursue your concerns - and contribute at least a
> proof of concept.

It's possible I might have had I seen an announcement here that an overhaul
was planned, with lead time provided. In my experience doing so right after
an overhaul is usually pointless.

> We are currently short of resources to help manage the web site and the
> wiki, so if you have an interest and a passion, and plenty of time on
> your hands, please let us see your hand raised to volunteer to get on
> with the work needed.

I've tried it before with other OSS projects, and with the W3 web site, and
it's been mostly a big waste of time. Mandriva's, Novell's & Redhat's
Bugzillas were exceptions in that improvements were made. Complaining to
Mandriva right after helped, but only because patches were expressly invited
that I found time to provide.

I don't have plenty of time. Participating in several beta projects saps up a
large part of my spare time, and that time consumption is compounded by the
OSS websites that support them being hard to use. The other problem is that
the weight of styling is usually so extensive that it's usually painful even
to attempt to offer even small improvements.

All that said, samba.org's CSS is relatively light, so I went ahead and
roughed it out so people get the idea how it could be, and maybe someone with
power to do so and time could take it further in actual application.

http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Tmp/Smb/sambaorghome.html mainly also touches fonts,
and works decently with default font sizes not far removed from standard. As
default size is increased, the px-fixed widths begin crowding the content.

http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Tmp/Smb/sambaorghomee.html touches widths, but not
any images, so background images aren't tailored to actual container widths,
but it does emulate the http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Sites/Ksc/ resolution
independence example provided earlier.

http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Tmp/Smb/ contains copies of originals, modifieds,
and diffs of html http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Tmp/Smb/htmldiff.pat, fonts only
css http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Tmp/Smb/cssdiff.pat, & fonts+widths css
http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Tmp/Smb/cssdiffe.pat, all of which are unusable
as-is because I removed relative URLs from hrefs & srcs, but serve to point
out changes made.
-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/