I fiddled around with the online appearance of the draft HIG a bit yesterday… basically created a CSS for it, to try and prettify the raw docbook->HTML output somewhat. Here’s an example of the old and new look.
It’s very much work in progress, as I’m kind of learning about stylesheets and docbook customisation as I’m going along, and there are a few obvious bugs and things I haven’t got to yet. But I hope you’ll already find it a bit easier to read… personally, I’m quite pleased with the tables 🙂
Hopefully we’ll be able to push out a HIG 2.2 release fairly soon, after which I’d like to see us do a bit of an overhaul on the whole document. IMHO it’s getting too big and wordy, and isn’t really laid out as helpfully as it might be. I’m thinking we might want to focus more on the types of UI that developers are actually trying to create (document editor, applet, desktop preference dialog etc.), rather than have them piece together the information from a chapters about windows, menus, and controls.
But at the end of the day, you’re the people who have to use it… let us know what you think!
Nice works ! Thanks.
About the rewriting of the HIG, I would like to say that I agree with you that it could be great if the HIG has a task oriented section that gathers all the guidelines for a kind of layout.
IMHO, the detailed section should stay if anybody wants more details and could be linked from the task oriented sections for example.
What could be very useful for developers would be some HIG compliant widgets/layouts in Glade so that gnome/gtk apps could be a minimum HIG compliant even of the developper doesn’t have time to comply with the HIG or simply doesn’t know about it.
Personally, as a developper, what I used to appreciate in the HIG is the technical sections giving the Glade parameters needed to have a compliant layout.
It was my two cents worth…
Great work ! It’s way easy to read on screen with this new stylesheet !
Having small guides by type of UI would be great. Maybe both can co-exists as severals quick guide and one master reference.