[Gimp-web] Menu proposal.

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 20:08:34 -0400, Carol Spears <carol@gimp.org> wrote:
> Branko Collin wrote:
> >On 13 Aug 2003, at 21:06, Niklas Mattisson wrote:
> >>- Tutorials
> >>- Documents
> >
> >Documents or Documentation?
> >
> >If the latter, I think Tutorials can be moved into the Documentation 
> >section, they do not necessarily need their own menu entry. Both 
> >serve a similar goal and present similar information.

Yes, I would also prefer to have Tutorials inside the Documentation
section.  Another solution that I thought about during the Camp was to
present the menu like this:
...
Downloads
Documentation
   FAQ
   Books
   Tutorials
Mailing Lists
...
where the FAQ, Books and Tutorials would be indented and would use a
smaller font.  But on second thought, that might not look that good so
it is probably better to just drop them from the menu.

But that brings another issue: a menu that expands the sub-sections as
you are navigating inside the main sections.  The old site does this
and this can be rather useful.  This is something that we should keep
in mind for after the official launch (probably near the end of this
month if everything goes well).

> > 'Classic' 
> >documentation (manuals) however, contain declarative knowledge ('what 
> >is?'), whereas tutorials contain procedural knowledge ('how to?').
> 
> Nope.  Tutorials are a free format and the authors have more leeway 
> to express themselves.  I rather think that the next site should not
> have such a militant template for tutorials.  Documentation is 
> everything that presents itself in that time tested and trusted 
> Docbook format, the complete format, as I consider the chunk I stole
> about what a drawable is to be NOTDOCUMENTATION since it is not a whole
> docbook entity.  I will fight any change to this definition of tutotial
> and documentation.  Even my friends and people whos fan club I started.

Well, it depends on what your goals are: making it easy for
contributors to write tutorials, or making it easy for GIMP users to
read and browse through the tutorials.  Even if we do not have to be
very strict about it, having a template and some "standard" look and
navigation for the tutorials can be a great help for those who read
them.  So I think that all tutorials hosted on *.gimp.org should
follow similar guidelines in order to make them easier to read.  Of
course, we could also link to other tutorials (from GUG and other
sites) and those would probably follow different guidelines.

> >>- Books
> >
> >This, too, should perhaps be under Documentation, but I am not so 
> >sure here.
> >
> This too, we just moved it and I like the new location.  Perhaps you 
> can help me remember why I like this better ....

Having "Books" in the main menu is a nice way to promote these books
and maybe the authors or publishers of these books could give
something back.  Also, these books are very useful and we should
encourage the GIMP users to buy (or at least borrow and read) some of
them because there are many GIMP tricks or image editing tricks that
can be discovered and understood faster by reading these books than by
trial and error or by searching on the web.

On the other hand, I think that we should reduce the number of items
in the menu.  There should be less than 10 items in the first part of
the menu (not more than 6 would be the ideal goal according to some
human interface guidelines, but this is very hard to achieve).  So
that would be a good reason to remove Books from the menu.

I dont' know what it better...

> >>- GIMP from source
> >>    
> >
> >Instead I like "Source" or "Source code" better, but that's just a 
> >personal preference. It might make it stand out a bit more, perhaps.
> >
> GIMP Sources?

I like "Gimp from Source" because it fits better with the others.  I
don't think that it needs to stand out more, because it already comes
first in the second section of the menu.

> >>- GIMP for Unix
> >>- GIMP for Windows
> >>- GIMP for MacOSX
> >
> >What happened to GIMP for OS/2?
> >
> Good question.  It needs to go back.

Yes, I assume that it was just a copy and paste error from scizzo.

-Raphaël