[Gimp-web] News on Screenshots/Imagebox

[Akkana Peck]

Raphaël Quinet writes:
> Well, turning off Javascript may not be the best option when you have
> 10 other tabs open to other sites that need Javascript (and do not
> have the same speed issues).

Realistically: how many people are going to turn off Javascript and
give up things like google maps just so they can view screenshots
on gimp.org? Is there a person anywhere who would make that tradeoff?

More likely, they'll just learn "never click on Screenshot when
you're on the gimp site." (I learned that pretty quickly, browsing
the site on an older machine.)

> What do we gain by trying to frame the screenshots inside a fancy box
> with Javascript animations?  In my opinion, we mostly lose:
> - The image quality gets worse.  As reported by others, the browsers
>   suck at resizing images (nearest-neighbor resizing) so the
>   screenshots look bad.
> - The resize effect when switching between images is rather annoying
>   (when the images do not have the same size or aspect ratio).
> - The navigation is not easy to use.  The controls should be visible
>   all the time in order to let the user browse through the
>   screenshots easily.

- The URL is lost, so if I want to link to a screenshot, or mail my
  friend and say "Hey, look at this cool thing GIMP can do!", I
  can't. I have to write a description of which screenshot to
  click on after going to the main site.

There are also issues with the current screenshot disappearing
(I found that if I switched to another desktop, when I switched
back the screenshot would often be gone or changed, but it wasn't
consistent).

There's also an issue with the layout and site navigation: at least on
my machine, the screenshots page dims everything on the page except the
screenshot, so the site navigation at the bottom of the page is
nearly invisible. And there's no header on the page at all, so it
doesn't look like it's part of the site except for the black background.

Speaking of layout, on the main page (not the screenshots page),
what's up with all the blank space? There's content at the top of
the page, then you scroll down down down down down past a lot of
empty greyness, then finally at the bottom there are some nav
links. Does the page have a fixed or minimum height set? Why?

Roman Joost writes:
> Actually I don't think that people would use that checkbox. 80% will
> oversee it, 19% don't care and maybe 1% will check it.

Agreed. I'm with Raphaël : better to just have a fairly simple site
because the animation doesn't add much except problems.

If you used a checkbox, would it be cookie based? Do people who block
cookies get the simple site, like people who have JS disabled? That
would probably make the most sense.

	...Akkana