Re: Site designs, upgrades, and Konqueror

On Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 01:47 AM, Dave Page wrote:

> Congrats!

On Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 01:46 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
> Congratulations! Since I compiled my first from-source program in
> 1999 (which
> was, I think, PostgreSQL), I understand the mental challenge of making
> the
> leap to source code. Plus compiling KDE with GCC on a Mac is no
> picnic,
> either -- you've initiated yourself into the world of source code by
> jumping
> in with both feet. PostgreSQL will be easier ....

Thanks for the show of support! However, I can't take full credit for
compiling purely from source: I used Fink. I did manage to get my
handles a little dirty figuring out a few dependency problems and
moving my fink installation onto another partition, but I'm sure
compiling purely from source and doing the make/make install shuffle is
quite a bit more involved, 'specially with the number of packages that
come with the Fink bundle-kde load. I think DocBook and OpenJade are
hiding around there somewhere, too. (The designer in me would love to
get my machine around the documentation!) Lots of stuff to explore.
Pokey at 266MHz but doable. (I remember thinking how fast this laptop
was when I upgraded from my 15.6MHz LCII... I wonder if I could run
PostgreSQL on it? :) I've got my eyes set on a new PowerBook for a xmas
gift to myself.)

>> But, now that I've got Konqueror (3.1.2, running in KDE 3.1.2)up and
>> running, I have a better chance to see what you've been seeing, Josh.
>> And unfortunately, I can't seem to reproduce the same things.
>
> Hmmm .... probably they occur only on 3.0.x, which means that we can
> ignore
> them. Linux people are used to being told to upgrade.

And you're used to doin' your own thing? :) Seriously though, I want to
create as few problems as possible for as wide a field of browsers as
possible (within reason). In the March 2003 Report Magic results,
Konqueror 3 was about twice that of Konqueror 3.1, though that's 9
months ago. Webalizer results for October and November show only
Konqueror 3.1; Konqueror 3.0 is not in the top 15. If the consensus is
to ignore it, that's cool, but I'll see what I can do to make it work.
Gotta figure out the disappearing text in IE6 too. Plus just make it
"look pretty".

>> One thing I was kind of surprised with in Konqueror was that the
>> minimum font size on my installation defaults to 7px, which is pretty
>> small. Is this the same on your installation, Josh?
>
> I don't know; it's been too long since I had default settings. But I
> suspect
> so.

I suspected so (that you had changed the defaults—I would have). I use
the named font sizes (xx-small through xx-large) as much as possible in
the CSS, and I believe in some browsers xx-small is limited to minimum
of 9px. Also, one of the nice things about named font sizes is that
they don't compound: xx-small in a div whose parent is xx-small is
still absolutely xx-small, it's not xxxx-small. This helps out in
readability and accessibility. This can be defeated, however, if the
browser's minimum font size is set to an unreadable level.

>>> 1) *All* elements of the existing site must be translatable through
>>> Andreas' new framework. Some are php/html static pages, some are
>>> php/html dynamic pages and some are fully dynamic.
>
> Yes. And I'd still like to see the admin interface for translation
> and run
> it by our team of volunteer translators.

Who's working on the admin interface? I assume it's Andreas. If there's
something I can help out with there, I should have some time next week.

> Which lead to some hellish problems with encodings, something to
> consider for
> multi-lingualism.

I just saw Dave's post, which probably answers this more directly than
what I'm about to write, but Unicode—in particular UTF-8—is really
helpful for this. Compact for roman languages (1-byte/char), a little
less compact for CJKV and other double-byte languages (1- to
4-bytes/char). Plus it simplifies serving the pages: set the header in
the server to UTF-8, declare it in a meta-tag in the HTML (skip the xml
prolog 'cause IE can't handle it) and you're good to go. Only *need* to
use entities for & and <, though others are nice if you don't
have easy access in your editor (and > is nice for symmetry).

Michael