I think the website looks nice and clean. It’s a pitty that it still uses tables for layout instead of css. Have a look at what can be achieved with a good stylesheet :
Also I hope the skin/theme of the forums will be updated to reflect the colors and look & feel of the website.
Keep up the good work
I have gotten over the use of tables for layout, my only suggestions would be for the images used to link to the different sections in the forums. And it would be nice if the colour scheme matched that of the main site more closely.
Actually, I like the color scheme of the forums. It creates a good environment and is organized nicely. If something was to be changed it would be the color scheme of the main site. :lol:
skyBurn7
I like the color scheme of the forums as well, but where it says forum index, Profile etc on the top it is a bit hard to read on my monitor because of the light text on the gridded background. Other than that, this is a very nice website.
I like css and all, and I started off trying to use them… but CSS is still an incomplete model, and there were quite a few things I was unable to do with spans and stuff that I easily did with tables. Once the specs for css are finished it can actually do everything I need, maybe I’ll replace the tables =P.
As for the forums, I’m really not sure if we’re going to modify the theme at all. If anything, we’ll change the colors a bit so that it looks more like the main site.
I like css and all, and I started off trying to use them... but CSS is still an incomplete model, and there were quite a few things I was unable to do with spans and stuff that I easily did with tables. Once the specs for css are finished it can actually do everything I need, maybe I'll replace the tables =P.As for the forums, I’m really not sure if we’re going to modify the theme at all. If anything, we’ll change the colors a bit so that it looks more like the main site.
I’d get rid of all of the triangles.
but CSS is still an incomplete model, and there were quite a few things I was unable to do
The problem is not the model, but the sucky implementations of poor browsers like Internet-Explorer or even the often-praised Opera.
It seems only Mozilla and Firefox currently have decent CSS-implementations, and even those have problems with some specialities.
I’m not really offended by the table-layout, but I’d give CSS a closer second look - I’m sure you can do anything you did with tables more cleanly, efficiently and less-painstakingly than with tables in the end.
That said, I’m really no CSS-expert…
One thing I don’t like when reading some of the CSS sites is that part of the articles simply disappear when they don’t fit inside their defined region.
And that frequently happens when I increase the font size in the browser window.
I’m doing this because too small fonts seem to be the rule rather than the exception when you’re browsing at resolutions above 1024x768 and trying to read those causes more eye-strain than reading the articles at a larger font size.
Please, don’t blame CSS for badly designed websites.
If sites resize badly, it’s the designer.
If text vanishes, hops, relocates, overlaps, it’s the designer.
If you can’t print, navigate, toggle off images, or turn off javascript without the page having the same core functionality, it’s the designer.
Saying that, CSS does have one or two limitations, but apart from that the only current problem is Internet Explorer forcing us to used a reduced CSS selector set (no >, +, *:hover, :before/:after etc).
Oh, and far too many developers are convinced that using css hacks is a good idea.
I’ve got a working table-free haiku-os.org hosted on my domain atm, i’ll finish up tonight, and possibly post the url later; There are quite a few advantages, i’m sure we’ll discuss them then. 
"]Please, don't blame CSS for badly designed websites.
"]I've got a working table-free haiku-os.org hosted on my domain atm, i'll finish up tonight, and possibly post the url later; There are quite a few advantages, i'm sure we'll discuss them then. :)
Hugh
<-- table master =)
It’s not that I don’t like css, I think it’s fun to do theming and stuff… but I haven’t had the time to learn an entirely new language, especially after it took me 3 years to get html to do what I wanted it to, but I haven’t been able to do quite a few things with it, and that frustrates me and makes me not want to learn it… Granted, I’ve become an expert at reading documentation, and I can learn new languages in a matter of days now, but it hasn’t seemed worth my effort to learn more than spiffing things up for the most part.
But I am curious to see a table-free version of the haiku site =).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with tables;
Early browsers like IE 3,4 & NS4 didnt have anything to lay out a webpage; if you didnt use them, you’d have simple paragraphs, images & horizontal rules. ick
(I’ve missed a lot out for the sake of argument)
IE 5 has got positioning, and some other basics, but this doesnt provide for an accessible website, fixed layouts, fontsizes etc.
IE6 has been sitting on windows machines for 2 years, Mozilla has had the same features nearly as long (and is now way ahead), and even Safari/Konq. is nearly up to spec.
So thats win/linux/mac/beos covered. And for all you textmode people, we have an automatic gain without tables - we render well as text.
We should take this time to improve sites for the future, and decide that tables are semantically the wrong way to markup a website.
Taking the current site, i’ve:
At the moment, i’m debating two methods for the side menus, thats my stumbling block.
The downside to this, is discontinuing support for older browsers that are stuck between full css and no css. Netscape 4.0 users will see a lynx style site. Same as IE3 users.
Net+ users are likely to get a slightly garbled site, and thats unfortunate. 
kurtis, I don’t want to appear like i’m trying to replace your efforts; I’d like to discuss this with you more, see if you’ll join the rebels 8)
John
*removed rogue /list
heh don’t sweat it john, it’s interesting enough to me… keep posting =)
btw, most of my work was in the programming, so you won’t hurt my feelings for bashing the html. The html work I did do was this… Stuart sent me pictures of what he had imagined and drawn out, then I spliced the images and made it actually work. I could honestly change the entire rendering of the site in one file… and maybe a couple header files.
Also, one planned upgrade I was hoping to do at some point was to follow xml compliance.
Righty ho - anyone watch the GP earlier? poor Kimi…
anyhow, to the point:
xml compliance comes with this version of the site - the only thing missing is the optional <?xml… It’s useful, because we can either extract the data & output it to a html4/tables page for some older browsers; provide automatic document creation (think docbook/man pages/compiled help files/etc)
Try this http://www.nextraweb.com/haiku/
The only pages i’ve done are the four root ones, learn/experience/develop/contribute
I hope this gives a good enough impression of what it can do.
Lynx output - http://www.nextraweb.com/haiku/lynxdump.txt
Size comparisions - http://www.nextraweb.com/haiku/info.txt
*edits, argh
I’m going to nut the javascript coder who wrote the close tags script for phpBB; even if i’ve got evenly matched tags, it always adds one on the end when I click submit.
yeesh
yeh you might want to bash the Netscape/Mozilla team for not implementing javascript properly … hang on didn’t they invent it 
yet IE seems to do a better job using it …
yeh you might want to bash the Netscape/Mozilla team for not implementing javascript properly ... hang on didn't they invent it ;) yet IE seems to do a better job using it ...
If you think so… :x
/me hugs his Mozilla
well don’t get me wrong I use Firefox as much as possible on Win32 and Firefox as the defacto on BeOS.
IE’s biggest problem is if something goes wrong with it … you usually have to reinstall the OS to fix it … and that’s MS’s official response too.
::start stupid comments::
I hate javascript… it’s the most evil, incosistant monster ever invented =)
i’ve never had the same thing work on 2 different systems whenever i’ve tried it… and like i said somewhere else, i found someone else’s javascript code to make the menus on the haiku page work, i would have never done that myself.
that and the word “script” makes me mad i think… not sure why… I probably associate it with the negative hacker term “script-kiddies”
k, enough useless babbling by me… continue the real conversation =P
::end stupid comments::
I hate javascript... it's the most evil, incosistant monster ever invented =) :
Amen to that! I had to deal with some development with javascript and i had to support bot IE and netsca. The whole things brings back terrible memories shiver