new site feature?

goobers wrote: Hi fats,

I was wondering if you wanted to take on a different feature design for the site. I hope it's not a difficult request.

What we have now is bright background. I personally hate dark text on bright background. It's like staring into a lightbulb.

What I was thinking was... maybe this is the light version of the design. What if there were a second design, dark background with lighter text on top? Make it toggle-able and have it save the user's preferences. The current incarnation could be the good supergirl, and the darker background would be, well, you know

Of course this is just a suggestion. I don't think we thank you enough for your efforts on the site, so let me say thank you very much. We appreciate the service you give us free of charge. If you don't get to this, or think it's a bad idea, I understand.

I'm working on a xmas version of this theme and also a dark version, i've been working on it for some time, i've got the text and background sorted, all i'm needing is the graphics, i would have bugged lfan for them but he's been very busy so it might be a little time for the dark theme to appear.

of course f users want to submit images for the dark theme i would have no issue with that.

Fats

njae wrote: While we're on the topic of new designs; are there any plans for a widescreen version of the site?

not at this time, too many people are still using 4:3 ratio screens once that number drops below 30% then we will change to a widescreen version of the theme.

the site looks ok on my 30" screen.

Fats

fats wrote:

njae wrote: While we're on the topic of new designs; are there any plans for a widescreen version of the site?

not at this time, too many people are still using 4:3 ratio screens once that number drops below 30% then we will change to a widescreen version of the theme.

the site looks ok on my 30" screen.

Fats

You should be measuring the window size, not the screen resolution. I think it must be a graphic designer urban myth that everyone runs their browsers maximized.

Of course I could get all W3C pedant, and point out nobody should be designing HTML for specific resolutions anyway, for reasons far too plentiful to bother listing. But such heretic ideas tend to rile the less technical members of the web design community, so I'll keep my head down.

being dyslexic black text on a white back ground is hard for me to read, that's one of the reasons for the development of the darker skin. When i did my pascal coding back in the mid 90's i had my Borland environment configured with a gray background to make it easier to code and when i went in to JS, Java, FS and C# i configured my editors with different colours to help me see what i'm coding.

One thing i like about the Joomla set up is that it's 99% W3C compliant, and works quite well with screen-readers and other adaptions for disabled users.

Noting beats the colour rendition of a CRT screen, i remember working on a 21" screen that had the best colour rendition, working on PS5.5 and being amazed natural the colours are. Now to get the same colour rendition you need to spend upwards of £1000 and have to use hoods like i do on my NEC PA301W-BK-SV.

fats

fats wrote: One thing i like about the Joomla set up is that it's 99% W3C compliant, and works quite well with screen-readers and other adaptions for disabled users.

If it helps, I wouldn't bother too much about W3C compliance; the only thing W3C validation guarantees is that your site validates against W3C standards. Certainly it doesn't promise accessibility (despite what countless government organisations tell you). It's nice as a rough guide, but nothing more.

True story: my day job involves the semantic web; recently I got an email from a certain government organisation panicking because a semantic web prototype I'd helped them with a bit didn't validate against W3C. Had to write a diplomatic email back explaining that, given the prototype used semantic markup, it might validate against some future W3C standard, but sure as hell wouldn't validate against a current one!