Playing around with a design

[Wannes]

Maybe I should put the PSD up on eBay.

you'd be a rich man. :p

[Japlabot]

Maybe I should put the PSD up on eBay.

so Neowin is NOT going to use this?? :s

[Glowstick]

i doubt that would happen. there is just too much going on and no way to get it 100% xhtml.

not yet anyways.

In what way? Design quirks breaking XHTML compliancy, or just the workload to make all compliant?

[SOOPAH256]

so Neowin is NOT going to use this?? :s

eek. i thought he meant that just as a joke....and i'm still pretty sure that he did.

but bah, if not...Long, keep that design here with neowin ;)

[ozgeek]

Whoa! I haven't been here in the SFI forum. Last time I was here, this thread was only page, when I came back it's 26 pages! :o

I like the development of Long's design. It looks professional and sleek. I agree with the idea of flash. You need to remember that some of us access Neowin at school, college or at work, and some of us might not be allowed to use flash player, like at my college when I tried to download flash player so I can view some flash games, I was denied access while attempting to install it.

I really liked the current Neowin.net logo, so I'd love if the admins keep this logo you see up top so Long's design is good. :D

[John Veteran]

*pretends like that made sense*

Yep. :yes:

Made perfect sense to me, and I think it's a great idea! :woot: Another vote for Tom Servo's XML/XSLT design (Y)

[matt74441]

Well I hope that Neowin decides to take on this, or any other layout that happens to come up. A facelift every now and then is good for a site, and with all the coverage that Neowin has been getting lately, we need a fresh look.

[Japlabot]

Made perfect sense to me, and I think it's a great idea! :woot: Another vote for Tom Servo's XML/XSLT design (Y)

Well I still use a 233mhz Processor, I'm using it right now, and I don't think that it would cope very well with intense cleint-side processing so needlessly when it doesn't hurt just to make it HTML/XHTML like every other web site on the internet.

It sounds like a good idea, but if you actually follow Servo's idea, then as much as I would want to, I just won't be able to visit Neowin.

[Tomi]

Long, if you sell it on eBay, youll be an extremely rich man.

But if you used it on Neowin, you'd be a extremely...umm...

[Long]

Maybe I should then. My family is suffering financial hardship.

[Redmak Administrators]

Do you want money for the design? (Please let me know before I spend more time on it)

It's your design so you can do with it what you want (except for the neowin logo). I just like to know if it's going to end up on eBay.

[MrWatchDawg]

I want money for it! Lol

[Storm]

Do you want money for the design? (Please let me know before I spend more time on it)

It's your design so you can do with it what you want (except for the neowin logo). I just like to know if it's going to end up on eBay.

he just informed me he is not selling it :)

[Long]

I've informed Redmak before you :p

[Glowstick]

Well I still use a 233mhz Processor, I'm using it right now, and I don't think that it would cope very well with intense cleint-side processing so needlessly when it doesn't hurt just to make it HTML/XHTML like every other web site on the internet.

It sounds like a good idea, but if you actually follow Servo's idea, then as much as I would want to, I just won't be able to visit Neowin.

Notice that I mentioned an "option" to enable or disable this. If the backend uses XML and XSLT, nothing speaks against sending it straight to the client, letting it perform the transformation. But the ability to send the raw XML and XSLT to the client doesn't stop the server from continuing to do the XSLT transform server side and send you the resulting XHTML that came out of it. I just mentioned the client side XSLT transform in case that type of site generation would ever be implemented here. Considering the server's under hard load some daytimes, it'd be always a nice option to offload processing to the client.

And for that matter, XSLT transforms aren't slow. The most time consuming part would be fetching the DTD from the server, should one be used. IE doesn't exactly want to cache the DTD for some reason. And Mozilla based browsers aren't even able to resolve external DTD references, which would at the end resulting in combining the XHTML entities with some Neowin Document DTD, creating a monolithic DTD. Otherwise, when these entities are not defined, stuff like   or ä and stuff like that would break the XML processor. In this case, a full DTD could only be used for site testing, but an entity DTD only be needed for production use, thanks to Mozillas inability. The only other option would be to convert all special characters and entities into Unicode entities. I doubt PHP does that natively yet. But it'd allow to skip the use of a DTD.

Meh.

--edit: Fixed missing stuff.

Edited June 4, 2004 by Tom Servo

[Toxikk Veteran]

In what way? Design quirks breaking XHTML compliancy, or just the workload to make all compliant?

i'm afraid there may be deprecated elements we would need that would prevent us from using XHTML.

besides... compliant 4.01 isnt bad. maybe we could even get it strict...

[Electronic Punk]

Looking amazing guys, I love it when sites get updates with new looks :)

Curious tho, what is the minimum resolution you guys intend to support?

[Long]

800x600

[Electronic Punk]

Great, the problem I have always had when trying to support multiple resolutions has always been boxes in the middle. You always end up with a space somewhere. In the end I just decided to make several themes so that a wide variety of resolutions would be supported and look exactly as I would expect them to at that particular resolution.

[Glowstick]

i'm afraid there may be deprecated elements we would need that would prevent us from using XHTML.

Most of that deprecated functionality can be done using CSS1.

[x2cube]

plz

plz

plz make this the official neowin skin

or sell it on ebay ;) ;)

[Chadwick]

hey i wanted to appologize, a lot of what i said i still feel stands, but some of it no longer does, it was awefully harsh, i shouldn't post opinions after an 8 hour night of work :/

Overall the idea is cool, but really when space is a premium have you ever considered an alternative to have huge icons at the top? I think htat space could be used better, im sure you could even keep hte longhorn look going, but the icons are a waste, although they shouldn't be completely removed, maybe just scaled down a bit.

Have you ever considered making it the users option of which 3 news items to show on hte front page? That would eliminate the need for hte tabs (hell, even having it tabbed could be an option), and than you can keep a nice design going that isn't too cluttered and retains the simplicity that the admins want to keep.

If you make the site completely css, im sure you would see alot more themes being developed especially with the ability to apply stylesheets client side with newer browsers (for testing of course), than possible submitting them.

ok im rambling, just a few ideas that ive had.

[Long]

Overall the idea is cool, but really when space is a premium have you ever considered an alternative to have huge icons at the top? I think htat space could be used better, im sure you could even keep hte longhorn look going, but the icons are a waste, although they shouldn't be completely removed, maybe just scaled down a bit.

Because some eye candy is necessary I believe.

Have you ever considered making it the users option of which 3 news items to show on hte front page? That would eliminate the need for hte tabs (hell, even having it tabbed could be an option), and than you can keep a nice design going that isn't too cluttered and retains the simplicity that the admins want to keep.

Why have 3 when you have 5 :D

[Jerry Grey Member]

That looks very good... :D

[Chadwick]

Overall the idea is cool, but really when space is a premium have you ever considered an alternative to have huge icons at the top? I think htat space could be used better, im sure you could even keep hte longhorn look going, but the icons are a waste, although they shouldn't be completely removed, maybe just scaled down a bit.

Because some eye candy is necessary I believe.

Have you ever considered making it the users option of which 3 news items to show on hte front page? That would eliminate the need for hte tabs (hell, even having it tabbed could be an option), and than you can keep a nice design going that isn't too cluttered and retains the simplicity that the admins want to keep.

Why have 3 when you have 5 :D

familiarity to potential members, if you go too drastic it will confuse them.

The tabs are awesome, but there is no efficient 100% compatible fast loading way of doing them, they should be an option, not a requirement. When flash websites stop having html alternatives than its ok to have no other option to hte tabs.

Eye candy can be achieved in more efficient ways than large icons :p

if you are going to use flash and icons might as well put an osx dock in there, who cares if it doesn't load on all systems and takes up space, it LOOKS cool and thats all that matters right?