Comments on Python Redesign

[Tim Parkin]

David/Lulu said:
>Yeah... this moves it from truly awful to merely bad.  So that's a good
>step.  Even so, the lines of text are squashed together vertically in
an
>awkward way that makes reading difficult.  I don't even really know how
>that effect was achieved (or in what browser)... is there a CSS
>attribute for "really small vertical spacing"?

1) it's an image
2) as an image created in fireworks, I expected line spacing to honor
html spacing. It doesn't however so I've fixed it. 

>In my experience, good pages remain good even in the complete absence
>of
>their CSS stylesheet.  Well, and CERTAINLY good pages do not embed
>ad-hoc <font> tags all over them, but I don't think the redesign demo
>did that.  While I'm only guessing, this is a page that would fare
>poorly with the CSS dropped, and with user-specified fonts and colors
>specfied.

1) it's an image
2) images don't have font tags
3) haven't got a clue what you mean about it fairing badly with css
dropped and fonts and colours changed. If by this you mean rendered in
text mode then the design would be a lot better than the existing site
as IT'S AN IMAGE you don't really have any way of knowing.

>The problem is that it is WAY over-designed.  It looks like something
>you'd design for a magazine, not for the web, with many browsers
>possible.  Parkins, or whoever, has a certain browser and screen size,
>and probably took out a ruler to align everything properly on that
>unique combination.

1) My name is parkin.
2) The site is designed to reflect the expectations of commercial
customers who are used to the likes of peoplesoft and atg, etc. also
it's designed to project an image to set Python alongside existing 
enterprise programming langagues (apologies for using the e word)
3) it's an image. Images don't stretch. If I make it any bigger
it would not fit in 800 wide browsers. A lot of designers make a choice
between fixed width and fluid. I would probably choose fluid for all
but the home page however I'm looking at fluid techniques for that too.

Tim