New Spring site design, I need your feedback.

[AF]

IE6 is fundamentally insecure.

If you dont like how other browsers look, firefox has an addon that makes all tis menus and controls identical to IE6. If you dont like tabs, just turn them off, tell firefox/opera/IE7 to open stuff in a new window instead of a new tab.

IE6 is a 6 year old browser from an outdated version of windows (98/2000), the world has moved on since then. It simply isnt possible to work with IE6 and expect not to run into these sorts of issues.







Do you want a screenshot for Safari and konqueror?

And that stuff about IE6 starting faster is nonsense. Perhaps for Firfox and Opera yes but if they take longer than 4 or 5 seconds its either old hardware, spyware/malware or bad configuration.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Sure, lets make a site that looks the same across all browsers... it's not possible TradeMark. Unless you limited the design to text only, cell phone screen size. Try to make sense, one liners don't add any value and tend to aggravate me. As I have to spend my time writing a balanced argument while you just make some wild clams.

You have to make choices on what to support to what extend. IE6 is exactly 6 years old today. If the site end up with a few graphical effects (like transparency) not fully supported by IE6 but the site itself functions correct then I'm not going to force the 80%+ of the other users to look at a sup optimal design. I agree it's not required to use effects not supported by IE6 but if it helps the design then IE6 loses. If you can't live with that then I invite you to help maintain site support for IE6. I already have code in place to detect IE6 browsers to make if function correctly extending that to make it look flawlessly in IE6 is possible. But my personal commitment is limited to function only.

[EDIT]
AF, got to it first.
[/EDIT]

[TradeMark]

Sure, lets make a site that looks the same across all browsers... it's not possible

Yeah you are right, there are always few pixels padding at wrong place etc, but they looks almost same. And i didnt count cellphone browsers, nor other crap browsers which cant use more than 2 colors etc.
What i ment is here: if you cant make the site look ALMOST same with all browsers, then you SUCK at making sites and you should give the job to someone else...

If you dont like how other browsers look, firefox has an addon that makes all tis menus and controls identical to IE6. If you dont like tabs, just turn them off, tell firefox/opera/IE7 to open stuff in a new window instead of a new tab.

No, its about the speed, it takes like 10 seconds to open firefox when i click some link from messenger or other programs, i dont like that, and thats why i still use IE. And why it takes so long? i close all useless windows when i dont need them, so it needs to start that firefox again, which takes that 10 seconds. With IE there is no such problem.

[AF]

As soon as I double click that firefox icon the animation showing the window opening starts immediatly, its near instantaneous. That could be because I have an existing firefox instance open, I dont know if firefox preloads this stuff.

IE7 and Opera took around 1 second to load.

I blame your usage of IE6 for slowing down Opera/IE7/Firefox.

btw if youve tried IE7 properly and didnt like it, how have you got IE6 on your machine atm?As far as Im aware Vista doesnt even let you use IE6 and XP has IE7 flagged as a critical security update.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Sure, lets make a site that looks the same across all browsers... it's not possible

Yeah you are right, there are always few pixels padding at wrong place etc, but they looks almost same. And i didnt count cellphone browsers, nor other crap browsers which cant use more than 2 colors etc.
What i ment is here: if you cant make the site look ALMOST same with all browsers, then you SUCK at making sites and you should give the job to someone else...

What I meant is that I won't spend time on making the site look almost the same with IE6 if it will hurt the design for the large majority of other users. But I'm quite willing to give you the job of IE6 support, read up on the documentation and get your hands dirty.

[FLOZi]

Everyone should use Opera anyway!

<3

[Neddie]

Internet Explorer 6 support isn't worth the effort. If you're using it, you're probably unable to play Spring or you've gone to great pains for the retro effect - which for the costs in terms of security make me feel like you shouldn't be permitted to play a UDP protocol game at all. More people will use Safari or the Wii browser to look at the Spring site than they will IE 6 - sorry TradeMark.

I'm posting from a PIII laptop using Opera with only 256 MB of RAM and it runs better than IE6 runs on my Core Duo with 3 GB of RAM. As soon as I get my Wii to VGA/DV-I converter cables, I'll do the same test with the Wii browser.

Now, talking about Firefox loadtime, Firefox does load a lot more upon startup, but an additional tab in Firefox is less demanding than an additional instance of IE 6. Opera is even slimmer per additional tab, if I recall.

Oh, and just for a round, your maps have been outdone in gameplay and appearance by MSPaint work. I wouldn't come down this hard on you if you didn't deserve it for parroting critique on the works of others without any sort of qualification.

[AF]

trademark likes to see 30 webpages in his taskbar, the diea of having a pretty tidy taskbar and a list of tabs that're 99% identical to his taskbar entries is blasphemy in his eyes.

Besides, if these modern browsers really do take a little longer to load up, the timing still favours them because they can then downlaod and display the webpage at least 3x as fast as IE6 can so in the end run IE6 looses out.

[Tim Blokdijk]

@FLOZi
Yhea, your just derailing the topic,.. and Opera is just for wankers.
(I mean what other "use cases" would require "gestures" and "hand free" voice control?)

[EDIT]
Lets not kill TradeMark over this, I would really like him to help developing the site, especially on something like IE6 support.
[/EDIT]

[cong06]

Edit:
For Tim's sake, I have withdrawn my post.
(even though, I totally agree with AF and neddiedrow, and think that TradeMark has obviously not tried firefox, like so many web viewers...)

[TradeMark]

What I meant is that I won't spend time on making the site look almost the same with IE6 if it will hurt the design for the large majority of other users. But I'm quite willing to give you the job of IE6 support, read up on the documentation and get your hands dirty.

You dont need to use transparent PNG:s, you can make good sites without such stuff. And there are still like 60% of IE users.

Oh, and just for a round, your maps have been outdone in gameplay and appearance by MSPaint work. I wouldn't come down this hard on you if you didn't deserve it for parroting critique on the works of others without any sort of qualification.

I didnt use paint, i used Paint Shop Pro 7, theres a difference.

trademark likes to see 30 webpages in his taskbar, the idea of having a pretty tidy taskbar and a list of tabs that're 99% identical to his taskbar entries is blasphemy in his eyes.

True, but not true: i use 3x wide taskbar, there can be added plenty of windows.

even though, I totally agree with AF and neddiedrow, and think that TradeMark has obviously not tried firefox, like so many web viewers...

I have tried firefox, and i dont like it, or opera, both suck, though opera is better than firefox.

Can we please stop this browser war pls. I dont care about what you say, i will continue using IE, and thats it.

[Satirik]

transparent png for ie 6 script : http://trac.turbogears.org/browser/webs ... s?rev=2929

just include it and it works ....

[AF]

http://taspring.org/

wonder who setup that site?

http://newspring.clan-sy.com has broken url rewritting, I take it you cant do a .htaccess work around or something similair to wordpress in parsing the strings that come after index.php?

http://www.mywordpressblogurl.com/index ... egory/post

This works though and all the links work using some url rewritting of sorts too:
http://newspring.clan-sy.com/index.php

Ill work on updating my copy at darkstars and then Ill make a few changes and see how people like them.

[imbaczek]

IE6 needs to die. Howgh.

[AF]

IIRC microsoft tried to kill it off by pushing out IE7 as a necessary update via windows update. Its also part of SP2c IIRC so no new XP oem builds will have IE6.

That and most new PCs come with Vista which doesnt even support IE6.

[Snipawolf]

I remember IE6... Vaguely >___>

No tabs is ghey. Merely because its 5 more windows open.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Anyway enough discussion about IE6.

...
http://newspring.clan-sy.com has broken url rewritting, I take it you cant do a .htaccess work around or something similair to wordpress in parsing the strings that come after index.php?

http://www.mywordpressblogurl.com/index ... egory/post

This works though and all the links work using some url rewritting of sorts too:
http://newspring.clan-sy.com/index.php
...

The "broken url rewritting" is a .htaccess redirect (will be an alias but that can't be done with .htaccess files) I plan on using it for the language system (auto detecting the language) but I'm working on the messageboard right now. The rest is "content negotiation" not "url rewritting".
Try to ignore the language and theme system for now, they are a bit the things from the start, no plans were discussed about these features, I guess it's a bit of "bare with me". I will finish the implementation and that will include documentation.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Then again, I would like to discuss the theme system as not that much is implemented and a few things are still up in the air on what to do with it.
Let me start from the start with this and plan it following the dev. process.

So what would you guy's like to have in a theme system?
Is there any need for themes? And why?

My idea is to have a theme per Spring mod.
Technically a lot is possible with themes (you can change everything you like) but we still have to figure out what is smart to do in practice.

[hrmph]

Uhm, I know I'm chiming in a bit late here but.. Why was there discussion about changing the logo? I've always thought the spring logo was attractive, simple: and easy to recognize. Those are the qualities that make the best logos anyways.. Oh yeah and the screens from the blue-ish site that someone posted are VERY nice.

[AF]

I think the priority right now should be patching up the existing site in svn and rolling it out as quickly as possible.

That means:

- Sorting out url rewrite
- A download page
- Fixing the pull down menus under Opera, they're on the left hand side covering up other menu options
- Fixing the wiki

The messageboard itself is fine.