[Actionchix] Re: yet another css design for linuxchix

[Akkana Peck]

Should we really be cross-posting this to both volunteers and
actionchix? I sent my last reply to just actionchix, but I'm
bowing to convention and leaving both in place this time.

chris writes:
> On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 22:13 -0400, Gloria W wrote:
> > It would be so nifty if a hover/click on the boxed arrow caused the 
> > indented expansion.

Please, not on hover. Am I the only one who hates web pages that pop
up menus or do other significant actions on hover, so you have to be
super-careful where you put your mouse if you want to actually read
any of the text on the page? I like hover effects that change colors
or otherwise provide highlighting, but anything that causes text to
move on the page or cover up other text makes the page harder to read.

> yes, the menu needs a little work - the section that is expanded should
> have an arrow pointing down and the links that do not have children
> should either have a page-like icon or no icon beside them. I just
> didn't have time to implement. 
> 
> On the other hand, fully expanded is how it would look to anyone without
> javascript enabled. 

Just checking: there's no code there now, right? I'm not seeing any
expanding or collapsing when I click on the boxes; I see everything
fully expanded all the time, but I do have JS enabled. 

The expand/collapse links in the right nav samples don't do anything
either. But I can't figure out what they should do: expand all the
headers? Collapse them all? Expand/collapse just the category
corresponding to the current page even though they're initially all
expanded? I prefer the models that don't have them since they take
away from nav space, it's not obvious what they would do, and they
jump around when you mouse over them because the bold font isn't the
same size as the non-bold font.  (I guess a lot of web designers must
use a font where those two are the same size, because I see that a lot.)

> Thanks! kind of an obvious metaphor, but fun nonetheless (in case
> someone picked up on it, the bash prompt isn't quite correct because we
> didn't want to put a $ symbol in it).

I like it (it seems suitably techy and cute) ... but I couldn't help
being a little disappointed when it didn't change with the page. E.g.
the home page is ~ but when I click on About I thought it might
change to ~/About or something similar.  It looked like a prompt so
I thought it might behave like one too. (Which would actually be
pretty easy to do: right now it seems to be implemented as an image,
but it's really just text on a solid background. I don't know if it
would be worth doing, just something that struck me.)

jennyw writes:
> Also, and this might be a terrible suggestion, but what would it look
> like if the nav were on the right, and the text wrapped around it (like
> is done with the logo right now)?  Maybe the logo could go above or

I like the mockup Chris did with nav on the right -- looks quite good
(though it could use a little more margin on the left edge of the
main content). That one doesn't wrap, but I don't think wrapping
would be a problem and it would people with narrow screens.
(Though I think it's harder to implement that in CSS.)

The nav-on-right looks nicer with logo than without, but Chris is
quite right that it doesn't work with the portrait-oriented logo.
It pushes the nav way too low.

	...Akkana