Re: WANTED: Design for documentation (Photoshop power users!)

[Patrick McCarty]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Patrick Horgan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
>
> I now added Patrick's design as an alternative stylesheet in git and
> triggered a rebuild of the docs on kainhofer.com. This way we can
> evaluate at the same time all the designs we get and then decide which
> we should use (or which aspects of which design should be merged for the
> final design). So, after the rebuild is complete (should be every moment
> now), all the texi2html-generated docs (but not the Doc index page!)
> will let you choose the design:
> http://www.kainhofer.com/~lilypond/
>
>
> Thanks, it let me get a good look at it.  All in all, so far I prefer
> Patrick's except for unvisited links.  It's not obvious enough that they are
> something to click on until I hover.  The color is so close to the color of
> the normal text, (Firefox 3 on Linux), that even the font difference isn't
> enough to tell.  Jacob Nielson's guidelines are based on extensive usability
> studies with experienced and non-experienced web users.  They really make a
> difference.  Note that he says that you don't necessarily have to underline
> if the color difference is noticable enough, but that you should never
> underline anything else on a web page because people think that denotes a
> link.  He also says never use blue text even if that's not your link color
> because people expect blue text to be clickable.

Actually, now that I've looked at this more closely, I can't figure
out why the alternate stylesheet is not underlining the links (both
visited and unvisited) on Reinhold's server.  On my page, they are
underlined:

http://uoregon.edu/~pmccarty/texi2html/lilypond-index.html

Strange... but my current style *does* underline all links.  Since
they are not underlined with the alternate stylesheet, I *completely*
agree with you; the links are indistinguishable from the main text,
which is not good.

-Patrick McCarty