[Sputnik-list] blueprint

[Jérôme Vuarand]

2008/2/7, Yuri Takhteyev <yuri at sims.berkeley.edu>:
> Considering Lua list's reaction to the Nanoki demo's clean interface
> and the fact that it's seems to be based on [blueprint][1] almost
> without any custom CSS, I was wondering:
>
> 1. Would it make sense to move Sputnik's templates to blueprint and
> get rid of most stylesheets.  (Or does anyone have recommendations for
> alternatives.)
> 2. More generally, what do people think about the visual appearance?
> Is there interest in a "cleaner" default?  No borders?  No underlining
> for headers?  What might be a "cleaner" alternative to the current
> menu bar?  (I've been thinking of making the menu bar optional, but
> ultimately I don't think one can have a serious website without some
> form navigation element on every page.)

I personnally don't like the appearance of the default Sputnik
template, but I must admit it works very well, both in show mode and
edit mode. I still use it for my configuration pages. However as a
basis for custom templates it's maybe too complicated, it took me some
time to understand how everything works.

On the navigation bar subject, I made changes to my sputnik copy to
have a flat navigation bar with all sub-sections displayed all the
time. I think it's more common, and easier to use. This allows quicker
navigation, and with a cascaded menu with javascript to close by
defaults sections other than the current one it doesn't take much more
space. On my website I don't have many sections/subsections yet, so I
have it fully expanded on every pages (see http://piratery.net/em/ for
an example template, and http://piratery.net/em/_navigation for the
navigation data). I can share the code (it may take some time for me
to setup a clean install to make a diff though).

About navbar-less sites, I think that a wiki with a sufficiently dense
network of internal links maybe very usable even without a navigation
bar. Also optionnal may mean hidden by default, but still accessible
with a client-side script.