Re: New website design: help needed

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 08:34:54 +0100
"Yury V. Zaytsev" <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 17. Feb 2025, at 08:06, David Niklas via mc-devel
> > <mc-devel-+hD5IHI5XseWCegYutOAJTiNl0CLU6MPYPYVAmT7z5s@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> * Ideally clean and light design (think terminalcss.xyz), accessible
> >> and browsable with both text mode / legacy browsers and modern
> >> software.
> > Umm, why use a framework if we're just doing a few pages? Like, one
> > css file is all we'd need. No framework necessary, right?
>
> Right, that's not a hard requirement. It's just that if I end up doing
> it myself, I'm definitely going to use Bootstrap or something to avoid
> writing my own normalization code and/or otherwise fiddling with
> differences between browsers, reinventing my own grid system, etc.
>
> The days when I knew the exact differences between MSIE 4/5, Netscape
> 4.75 and Opera 5 rendering engines by heart are long gone, and I'm not
> interested in investing more than the bare minimum in maintenance at
> the expense of bulkiness, which is irrelevant these days anyway.
> Upgrading Bootstrap has been a pleasant experience over the years
> (compared to maintaining my own resets and hacks).

Good point. I had hoped that such things were more a concern of the past
with HTML being a spec and webbrowsers supposedly targeting that spec.

> >> * The implementation should be HTML5, using some static generator -
> >> maybe hugo or mkdocs?
> > HTML5 isn't supported by legacy browsers such as lynx. You might use a
> > subset of the markup language, and that would work. Why is HTML5 a
> > hard requirement?
>
> Define "not supported". Lynx renders HTML5 structured with graceful
> degradation in mind perfectly well. By HTML5, I meant clean, modern,
> accessible code that takes advantage of all the latest semantic
> constructs, not that it should be completely useless in old/text-mode
> browsers. In fact, I specifically mentioned the opposite.

I agree that Lynx tries to do the right thing. That being said, here's
what the mantainer, Mr. David Woolley, has said about Lynx and HTML5
(source lynx mailing list).

"<snip>
Lynx's internal data structures are nothing like even the original HTML
document object model, and that has been greatly changed/extended in the
creation of HTML5.

Implementing the DOM would require radical restructuring of Lynx.  The
best that one can really hope for is some of the more commonly used
browser object model operations (although many of those relate to
windowing) and the recognition of certain common idioms without any
corresponding deep structure."

Or again, "<snip>
In particular, HTML5 was developed by WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application
Technology Working Group).  The Applications part of that name indicates
that it is fundamentally intended for client side scripting, and
therefore will never get good support from Lynx, as a Lynx that could
handle it would be so fundamentally different from the current code,
that it would be better to start over, from the code of a graphical
browser."

Or again, "<snip>
(One of the key features of HTML5 is that the behaviour of all compliant
browsers should be the same, even for broken documents.  That is not
going to work with non-graphical browsers, like Lynx, or browsers that
take short cuts in parsing, that assume that the input document is
valid.)"

> >> * There should be room for an AdSense plug.
> > Because you know everyone loves ads. ;)
>
> They pay for the domain and SSL certificates though, so I'd like to
> keep the account active. You can have a look at what it is right now. A
> single ad at the bottom of a single page, and it pays for the domain,
> that's it.
>
> It's not like there's a secret commotion by some underground benefactor
> to invest a few million of bitcoin proceeds into a newly formed
> Midnight Commander Foundation that will make this point irrelevant.
>
> Besides, those who *don't* love ads are browsing with AdBlock enabled,
> aren't they? And I haven't seen many ads in Lynx either.

You mean you're not going ad crazy like the rest of the internet?
The horror! ;)

> > What sort of timeframe are you looking to get this done in?
>
> I have no hard deadlines, but ideally a few months. I hope to make some
> progress on other fronts (ticket and wiki migrations) by the end of
> March. This will make a home page migration possible, but it can be
> postponed for quite a while by simply making parts of Trac read-only,
> which I hope is not too complicated.
>
> All the best,
> Yury

That's a fine timeline. I could probably help.

Sincerely,
David

PS: Don't forget to reply to the mc-devel list.
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