I can't tolerate bad typography
I bought a CD some time ago of all the back issues of SysAdmin magazine—complete with back issues of The Perl Journal as well. I'm not a sysad, but I host my site on a virtual colo, so I have to pretend to administer my server. In reality, I just bother my sysad friends all the time. So I saw the offer on techbargains.com and I figured maybe I should learn something.
And one of an article page:
I found the typography claustrophobic and the image button navigation distracting. I couldn't finish the first article because the lack of whitespace between the red cell border and the content kept dragging my eye down.
And an article page with a larger font and a little more breathing room.
I spent very little time on it, and it's far from perfect. There's really only so much you can do with bad markup, anyway. But at least now there's a chance I could read it.
Naturally, by the time I had tweaked it enough to remove it from the
But I...can't...read it!
last night I cracked it open for the first time. All the issues and articles are in html, so I loaded up index.htm (I'm always weary of html files with the htm extension) and lo and behold, it's a framed interface with content oddly presented in a TBL. Standards aside, why bother with a table when you only have one cell in one row? This is a shot of an article list page:
And one of an article page:
I found the typography claustrophobic and the image button navigation distracting. I couldn't finish the first article because the lack of whitespace between the red cell border and the content kept dragging my eye down.
Hands on
Fortunately, the CD has all the source, so I copy it all to my hard drive and start up vim. I'd prefer to modify as few files as possible, so css is the logical choice. There are thousands of files comprising the complete documentation, so without writing some perl scripts to strip the content out of the TBL, etc etc, I have no control over the markup. This makes updating the css more challenging. To boot, there are no class or id assignments. Most design elements were created using tag attributes such as bgcolor. The topnav is one file consistently populating the top frame, so I rewrite it and the supporting css to do away with the dreadful buttons. Otherwise, I haven't peeked at many articles, so I assume their layout is consistent, and I attack the main (notably sparse) css file to improve the content layout where I can.A little breathing room
The new article list page:
And an article page with a larger font and a little more breathing room.
I spent very little time on it, and it's far from perfect. There's really only so much you can do with bad markup, anyway. But at least now there's a chance I could read it.
Naturally, by the time I had tweaked it enough to remove it from the Complete Disastercategory, I needed to go to bed. Knowing me, I'll probably write the perl scripts to extract the content into a local db and write a better UI wrapper for it all. Then, maybe I'll get around to reading it. What were those articles about, again?
