Re: tabtastic, function-driven design etc

Antonio, all

On Apr 3, 2006, at 23:29, Antonio Cavedoni wrote:
> I will be on holidays in Japan from wednesday the 5th of april until 
> monday, the 1st of march so I won’t be able to make it for this 
> meeting.

日本へようこそ！ Hope you enjoy your vacations :).

> (An aside for Olivier: my proposal is still in the works, I hope to 
> get it wrapped up by the first half of May so we can all discuss it 
> together).

Actually - and that should not preclude you from sending in your ideas, 
hopefully it could even help it - the discussions we had about your 
proposal piqued my interest, and there were some aspects I needed to 
play with in order to make up my mind.

Notably, the idea to put the navigation links at the bottom of the 
page, and reducing the volume of the home page drastically with a 
tab-based system (also, quite a while ago we had discussed about using 
tabtastic or a similar system for results, so I gave it a try for the 
homepage to get a feel of how it degraded with non-css or non-js 
browsers - quite well).

My playground, based on the css validator, is at:
http://qa-dev.w3.org/~ot/css-validator/validator.html.en
and obviously it's still a bit messy and broken, but it gave me a 
better idea on some points:

- at least on the home page, and if said page is small enough, the nav 
links are OK at the bottom

- unlike what I first thought, having to click on a "tab" to get to the 
alternate, less popular interfaces is probably not too disruptive.

- removing some of the visual elements of the page (in the current 
playground version, I removed the footer - which is a pity, love that 
image ;) -) does give more focus to the central element, the form 
field.

- removing all visual elements (header and footer images, etc) gets too 
dry for my taste. Personal taste, admittedly.

One things I would add to the current mockup: instead of going to a 
different page, the "extra options" link (also, made less verbose) 
could toggle the visibility with the help of some DOM scripting. the 
href would of course still point to the separate page, but 
scripting-enabled browser users could use extra options with less 
to-and-fro.

This is still very much a playground mockup, but if you have opinions, 
they're welcome.
-- 
olivier

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2006 08:32:13 UTC