Misc. features to think about

Submitted by Marbux on Thu, 03/27/2008 - 07:57

A few thoughts after using C01 for several days. FWIW, my first career was as a typographer. However, I note that I know nothing about the feasibility of some of these suggestions. I'm placing the suggestions in this forum because they may have applicability to other themes you are working on.

  • Horizontal separation. The right sidebar content is a bit too close to the main body for my taste. I'd recomend either a wider gutter or (my preference) a thin vertical rule between the sidebar and the body, with an identical or double vertical rule on the left side of the body for visual balance.
  • Vertical separation. There are issues with vertical separation of paragraphs. E.g., the space between paragraphs is less than the space between a list or blockquote and a paragraph. The text also tends to run together visually, especially when a paragraph last line is nearly full, because the space between paragraphs is too constrained. Alternatively, you might consider setting a style to indent each paragraph's first line by 1-1/2 to 2 ems.
  • Option to set paragraphs to ragged right. Full line justification doesn't work really well absent a competent hyphenation algorithm, particularly if site content tends toward long words. An option to set line justification to flush left/ragged right would be nice.
  • Option to show site logo/title in reverse and to select color. C01 currently allows a choice of different variants, some with the site logo/title in reverse, some not in reverse. Options to set foreground and background colors in this region would really make C01 more versatile, without requiring users to take the deep dive into CSS editing.
  • Accessibility/hyperlinks. All C01 variants display hyperlinks without underlining or visual cues other than color. This is a Web Accessibility Guidelines Priority 1 checkpoint failing. See e.g., this section, which specifically mentions the lack of underlining of hyperlinks as an issue. This is an issue in the U.S. alone for some 20 million people with low vision and an unknown number of people with color blindness for the given color of hyperlink title. An option to set hyperlink formatting/coloring without diving into the CSS would be very nice.
  • Validation. Theme does not generate valid XHMTL 1.0 Transitional. See e.g.,
    this validation run     on your home page.

The validation and accessibility issues are the most urgent, of course. Because of them, I will not be able to use the C01 theme before those issues are addressed. I encourage you to do so, however. You have an outstanding beginning, but it needs some finishing work.

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Thanks for the response.
Fri, 04/04/2008 - 10:39 — Marbux

Thanks for the response. It's way cool to run across developers who care about user feedback. That makes writing bug reports/feature requests worthwhile.

  • Horizontal separation. Configurable gutters betwixt the columns would work visually, although again my personal preference is for hairline vertical rules, e.g., in the same color as the hyperlink color for consistency. On the other hand, I grew up in the era when newspaper columns were still separated by vertical rules, so I may be showing my age here. :-)

    BTW, just as an example of how visually attractive vertical rules can be when accompanied by other good design elements, see this PDF. 'Twould be spectacular if both column gutter widths and vertical rules/weights/colors could be options.

  • Option to set paragraphs to ragged right. Neat-o. Will this be available for 5.x and if so, any rough idea when?
  • Option to show site logo/title in reverse and to select color. Great.
  • Accessibility/hyperlinks. Great again. One option you might consider: I've seen some sites that underline links but do so with a series of smallish dots separated by spaces rather than with a solid underline. That lessens the visual impact of a solid underline whilst still preserving a visual cue for those with low vision and color blindness. IIRC, the Roople Tapestry theme does that in some of its variants.
  • Validation. Wow. I learn something new about Drupal every day, it seems. Thank you for the tip. And checking now, I see that I have several pages that need the fix. Thankfully, the site is new enough that I don't have much there other than test content, so not too much to fix.
Excellent suggestions
Sun, 03/30/2008 - 20:40 — artist.lupein

First of all, I must say this is great post with insightful thoughts. Sharing experience with us is really appreciated.

For the sake of discussion, I'll go point by point:

  • Horizontal separation. Thin line would work just fine for some theme layouts/configuration, but I feel that it would not with some others. I tried hard to add only feature that will fit well together with others. Otherwise, it could turn out that theme is too hard to configure. Seems to me that having configurable sidebar margins could do the trick here. What do you think?
  • Vertical separation. Good point. I'll try to fix it.
  • Option to set paragraphs to ragged right. Excellent suggestion. We are already working on set of classes that could be used when you configure your Drupal content. I'll add those to the list.
  • Option to show site logo/title in reverse and to select color. As for logo/title order, can do. Theme header background color is already configurable, or so I believe. It is good spotting that we overlooked to make font color configurable too.
  • Accessibility/hyperlinks. Good point. I read the guidelines to freshen myself and also found few more accessibilites issues.
  • Validation. Actually, guilty party here is Drupal. Theme is fully compliant. This is known issue with automatically generated teasers. Thing is that Drupal generates teaser by breaking the content after some number of characters, without respecting the XHTML structure. It can be done manually as described in article on drupal.org. Manual break is important for Drupal 5, since Drupal 6 is easing the problem by letting you edit the teaser separately. Of course, other guilty party is our webmaster, who missed it after latest changes;) A tithe to tight schedule, I guess.

Once again, thank you for suggestions. Such posts make it worthwhile sharing themes with the Drupal community.