Re: Ada Reference Manual 2012 in info format

[Jerrid Kimball <jerrid@kimball.co>]

On 04/30/2012 10:19 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Jerrid Kimball"<jerrid@kimball.co>  wrote in message
> news:jnla59$h9e$1@munin.nbi.dk...
> ....
>> I'm slowly getting to putting some modern-looking versions on the web
>> based on the work of a fellow #ada IRC channel visitor.  I hope to get to
>> it soon.  I'll keep CLA informed!
>
> I suppose some people need to have a pile of eye-candy before they're
> willing to use anything. Sad.
>

It's really much more than that.  With a community of sites that 
generally look like Ada Home, no casual developer is going to stick 
around.  When the impression is that something is dead or near death who 
wants to invest any time, money or energy in it?  As a whole, we give 
this impression.  It's not necessarily our faults being left-brained and 
all, but at some point not presenting a modern face to the world at 
large hurts us as a whole.  AdaIC for example has done a decent job 
updating its appearance.

> For the record, the design of the Ada Standard HTML had two main criteria:
> (1) Look as similar to the PDF as possible; and (2) use only basic HTML 4 so
> that works on as many devices and browsers as possible. Those goals prevent
> the use of any significant eye-candy. (So does the desire to have these
> things work for people who insist on safe browsing - no scripts, no flash,
> no crap.)
 >
These are all noble goals, but I think they're silly in today's 
environment.  I think expecting a PDF to look like a webpage or vice 
versa (cue eye rolling).  Today's web looks a lot different than it did 
in 1995 and there's a point where you just have to say fuck it and leave 
those old devices in their own filth.  That's not to say that a modern, 
full-featured page can't be backward-compatible; we call is graceful 
degradation.  Of course, languages like Ruby or Python don't have great 
sites to operate across devices per se, but they look good and they're 
packed with info and the result is that they're bursting with 
popularity.  We're in a world where looks and features do matter. 
Blackberry is a better platform, but Apple has the apps.  Get it?  Being 
a bitchin' language isn't enough.  I'm more than pleased to use the 
official RM.  We have to get it together as a *brand* and quit being 
curmudgeonly engineers all the time and proselytize by not looking like 
a heap of fossils.

> The only changes I would make today is (1) more modern button designs (I
> lifted those from Windows NT 3.1, so they're a bit stale. :-) -- but
> unfortunately I'm neither an artist nor have much visual imagination, so I
> have no better ideas, and I haven't found anything better in the programs
> I've used (the LibreOffice icons make less sense than the ones in the
> Standard). And (2), I'd prefer to bound the maximum column width -- but
> that's not a possibility in CSS 1 or 2. (You can easily make a *fixed*
> column, but that would prevent using the Standard on small devices like my
> phone - a non-starter.
>
> The yellow background that you claimed to hate was done to differentiate the
> Standard from other pages that you're likely to have open in your browser:
> compiler documentation, ASIS, the Ada Rationales, etc. That came from other
> users that wanted to be able to see at a glance that they were looking at
> the Ada Standard and not some other page. I'd hate to lose that (not that we
> will in the "official" versions).
>
>                                           Randy.
>
>

Ideally I could spend all my time building the community and creating 
tools to make Ada more accessible, but alas I can not.

With love
Jerrid