is this coherent to people?

[solarbird]

I finally wrote up the design document for Coexistence Alpha. (Link goes directly to an .rtf.) Does this read coherently to people?

Comments

[annathepiper]

Looks generally coherent to me. :)

[solarbird]

Thanks!

[marahmarie]

This part, emphasis mine: The default text size is outside the direct control of the style, being set in user preferences. However, it is set in em, which is unreliable across browsers. The default user text size should be set in px, which - despite the apparent hardware-related nature of the unit - is actually more predictable across browsers. I suggest 14px.

That will _probably_ never happen - but don't quote me, as I don't work for DW nor do I volunteer nor do I join in on their IRC, so I might be wrong. But using pixel-based design has been strongly discouraged across the web - at least for fluid, responsive, re-sizable designs - for years because it can't be re-sized, so even if a design scales up/down based on screen width exactly as it should, if the user wants text bigger or smaller than what the designer chose (from what I understand of the reasoning behind this) then they won't be able to have it, as the pixel basing makes it so browser font resizing doesn't work.

As there are likely people who don't have Dreamwidth accounts but surf to Dreamwidth links given to them by friends/found in Google etc, it has to be taken into account that at least a small segment of people won't have access to the Wizard to reset things themselves.

That said, it is of course for Dreamwidth to decide, I'm just throwing out thoughts for why they may not go with that (but they might: I want to stress that I have no idea, only that I think they chose ems for a reason).

The only suggestion I'd offer up otherwise is to change "Neutral Good for Practicality" throughout your paper to say something like, "many of Dreamwidth's layouts, including, in this case, Neutral Good for Practicality" and to back off more direct criticisms (like the line that starts with: "Neutral Good for Practicality, as currently set up on new user accounts, sends the eye back and fourth four times") because the vast majority of style sheets, likely including that one, are made by Dreamwidth's unpaid, volunteer coders, not site staff or admin, and many of those layouts are already several years old (and even older than that) so the volunteers weren't able to take cutting edge design (flat, compact, responsive, etc.) into account when they designed them, because those weren't really Things yet, and I can just see someone getting a bit sore should they run across your paper and see it as a critique of their coding of that particular style sheet, which I'm sure isn't your intention, but right now that is how it reads!

That said, I'm not criticizing you and hope you don't take it that way: I'm just trying to figure how your paper might read all around.

*goes back to reading the rest of it*

ETA all done reading through it. I know you asked if it was coherent (and it is, totally!) but I just thought I'd throw these thoughts on it out there, as well.

[solarbird]

I know that em has been encouraged, and from a developer standpoint and a theory standpoint, I'm sympathetic and support use of em. I have tried to use em in the past.

But from a graphic designer standpoint, it's a nightmare. I talk to full-time design people about what I'm trying to do here and they're like, "I don't see how you can design for that."

(Also, px on fonts does get rescaled. I look at it being rescaled on fonts every round of testing on Safari for iOS. That may only be Safari for iOS? I don't know. But it does.)

That said, the issues you bring up are why I'm only throwing it out there as a recommendation, which they're free to ignore. I won't get bent out of shape about it unless it really starts breaking things. But the presentation effects are meaningfully detrimental; it is legitimately a question of visual functionality. I would be remiss not to talk about it.

Neutral Good for Practicality... I can just see someone getting a bit sore should they run across your paper and see it as a critique of their coding of that particular style sheet, which I'm sure isn't your intention

It absolutely was and is my intention. Hell, my commentary in that document is gloves-on, not gloves-off, and way gentler than you'd get in an art school critique. I'm kind of wondering if I'm understating the case in the service of trying not to sound mean.

Let me get a little more direct here: from a visual design standpoint, NGforP is just as broken as a database fetch that randomly fails to return data. Particularly on mobile, but all-around generally, the situation isn't just dire, It. Is. Broken.

And I understand that somebody might feel bad about saying that about the style they wrote some years ago, but I don't know how to avoid talking specifically about NGforP here, because 1) that's what I'm trying to repair, which is in turn because 2) it is the new user default style, as chosen by Dreamwidth, which makes it both their fault and the specific urgent problem at hand.

I wouldn't talk about NGforP at all, otherwise - there are a virtually unlimited number of bad styles out there, for all platforms. And Dreamwidth's styles - generically - are particularly bad. It's not like I have to go spelunking for them.

But this is what every new user gets, and it's broken.

Maybe it takes someone coming in kinda from outside to recognise how broken it really is. I don't know.

So here are some gloves-off facts: the current styles situation both specifically with NGforP and across Dreamwidth in general actively drives people away from the site. I personally know multiple people who want to use Dreamwidth but won't because it's so hideous and broken, particularly on mobile.

Not just ugly: broken. They can't, won't use it.

My goal here is to modify something which already exists so it can be implemented quickly to get the new user situation to a base level that works, and stops literally driving people away from the site.

Some of the people I talk about above are considering trying Dreamwidth with Coexistence Alpha. That's how I know I've hit my minimum bar.

Because please understand: it is a minimum bar. I am not setting myself up here as some kind of Design Wizard. As a designer, I am not proud of this result. I think of my work here as less "design" and more "carpentry" - Coexistence Alpha is the design equivalent of shoring up. Even with all I've done, it's still bad - but it's a usable bad.

The only thing I've actually designed for Dreamwidth so far is Navbar 3 for Mobile. Everything else is me just trying to keep the ship afloat. I'm not aiming for the sky here - I'm just trying to get back above water.

Re: pixels

[marahmarie]

Not that I'm showcasing any bastion of good design over on my own DW (you couldn't use my style sheet for ideas if you wanted to because the mobile functionality is written in backwards, which I did shortly before finding out I was supposed to make my design Mobile First, according to all the Good Designers; so after that I looked at my style sheet and considered re-doing it like they said, but then I was like, the hell with it - it's just for my ow personal use, so maybe next time I switch to a new style I'll try it) but fwiw I get around the fact that ems (and percentages, in my case, which I like even more) are a pain to work with for mobile design by over-sizing most of my break points. Like, if I should wrap some page element at exactly 750px for whatever reason, oftentimes I'll wrap at 775px or slightly higher. It keeps things - like text, usericons, post body user-added images, etc. from running off the visible/usable portion of the page - because everything starts re-sizing/getting re-scaled downward in size at least 20px before the re-sizing is even required.

Then again, I wrote my mobile end of things backwards, which might make anticipatory re-scaling a bit easier (I've never tried it the opposite/recommended way, so I really don't know).

But I mean, if that's specifically what gets on your nerves about not being able to write more of the code in pixels, that's how I get around it for the most part. Stepping back from using pixels so much annoyed me, too, for years (actually, my entire style sheet, including my mobile section, remained _in pixels_ until about 2014, when I very slowly and very badly began converting it over).

And yeah, resizing on iOS/Apple et al in pixels might be a thing but afaik is not on most other devices. The whole reason I converted my own layout was hitting the wall of being unable to adjust my DW's text size on my phone, which was running Windows 8 Mobile at the time! All it took was that, because then I thought of other people leaving my page after seeing they couldn't adjust my text size, either, and I was like, OK, the heck with it, I'll just try to convert everything.

[solarbird]

Now I'm worrying that you'll take this as snappish. I appreciate you reading and giving your reaction! I mean it, not just trying to play nice.

But I'm trying to make it clear how bad the situation actually is to outsiders who aren't used to it. That's why I'm concerned that I didn't drive that home strongly enough in the design document. It's a serious concern to me now.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, we're really used to bad design around here (I'm not kidding) so I can see why you'd want to drive that point home - I think everyone who's hung around DW for a while has taken bad design as one of the tradeoffs of being here, since the site has tons of unusual and particularly good features that really do differentiate it from Most Journaling Places.

And no, I'm not taking it bad at all, because I totally understand the desire to Make This Right that's driving you - I feel the same way, I've just never been one to pipe up much about it (although I have been known to go off the deep end about the navbar - a rant of mine which pre-dates this particular convo and previous ones we've had on it by many years). I think the reason I keep quiet on the design front around here is because my trade-off for putting up with all the bad design is I get to make suggestions in the Suggestion community for improving other aspects of DW and some of the extant functionality, and that does tend to keep my fires lit, so to speak.

[solarbird]

Looking at the 14px thing, I didn't make it clear enough that this was a suggestion - I only called out that it's not part of the style definition and suggested a size. I've made that clear in my working copy.

[marahmarie]

Thanks for the many clarifications.

My hair did sort of stand on end last night wondering what the maker of the style and layout might think should they ever stumble across this (but that's actually two different people; the base style and a slew of initial layouts were all made by one person (user timeismymeasure) and many more subsequent layouts were made by a few others.

The original style submission:
https://dreamscapes.dreamwidth.org/43646.html

History of new layouts for the style: https://dreamscapes.dreamwidth.org/?tag=%7Epracticality&skip=20
(last updated in 2011 but that might not be a canonical resource to tell the entire history from)

The base style was made by them in 2010, which, just for emphasis, makes it seven years old. At that stage of the game Windows 7 for mobile (which actually jump-started flat design here in the States, afaik) was probably not even getting started. All these things I held in my mind as I read through the paper, which is the only reason I offered the suggestions I did.

That said, I had no idea (and don't know how I missed it, but thanks for making me aware) that Dreamwidth has (just recently, I guess?) adopted Neutral Good for Practicality as the site's new default base style. In light of that unknown to me fact, then yes, it does have - according to what you're saying (not too familiar with it, myself) a lot of problems to be the default offering for all users, so in in that sense it's indeed pretty appropriate to point out what's wrong/why it's wrong/what needs updating.

Maybe it would take the heat off it a bit to emphasize that back in 2010 all the things we prefer and need now, things we consider part of "a good style" (on the responsive/re-scalable/re-sizable tip, especially) were simply Not Much of A Thing back then (but that's just me: I'd focus more on what needs updating and less on _what's wrong with it_ per se, but if you're focusing on selling the updated design to DW then it does make sense to point out *why* it needs updating, not just *what* needs updating).

But everyone on DW/LJ (myself included) was pretty much still designing for wide screens back in 2010, which, as you probably know, is a much more forgiving design medium for overdoing certain elements (borders, I'm looking at you) and underdoing others (like coding the CSS and underlying HTML so there's any hope of re-sizing the darn thing on mobile without all hell breaking loose on-screen).

I'm glad the work you're doing now is to improve the "default layout" (I still can't believe I didn't know it was the new default!) because we've needed a good/responsive/more workable layout to present to new users forever. And I agree the poor styles DW has overall do tend to drive some away (only because I've seen people say so in the site comments _so many times_ over the years I can't even count up all the comments to that effect. This complaint has Been a Thing, lemme tell you!).

Best of luck with it. :)