[Gimp-web] News on Screenshots/Imagebox

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:38:54 +0200, Roman Joost <romanofski at gimp.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 10:01:51AM -0700, Akkana Peck wrote:
> > - 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.
> Yes - thats one of the disadvantages of the javascript stuff.

One of the many disadvantages, alas.  So far, nobody has explained
what is(are) the advantage(s) of using Javascript and animations.
So it would be nice if someone could answer the following question:

What do we gain in terms of usability or user experience by using
fade-in animations for the menus and a fancy box for the screenshots?

Except for "hey, it's cool" (and that novelty wears off quickly), I
only see disadvantages: poor usability, navigation made more
difficult and slower, additional maintenance effort, and degraded
quality for the screenshots.  Maybe I'm too old-fashioned, but I am
really reluctant to have these animations on our web site.  I could
probably be convinced if they added something useful that cannot be
done with plain HTML (for example, being able to hide the menus to
see more of the page, or allowing the user to browse faster through
the screenshots like Flickr does with the scrolling thumbnails) but
so far this is not the case.

> The point is, we don't have a system which creates the pages
> dynamically. With that, we could have implemented an imagebrowser in
> 'HTML mode' only.

Why would you want to create pages dynamically?  They are already
generated from sources and we can adapt the build system if
necessary.  It is possible (and even easy) to generate static HTML
pages that allow you to browse quickly through a set of images.
And even without generating special pages for viewing images, we
still have the option to do as Inkscape does: just provide large
previews that link to the images directly.  In fact, I like the
Inkscape layout (and our "old" way to display splash screens) more
than the current solution.

-Raphaël

P.S.: As I said in a previous message, I know that some efforts
      have been invested in trying to make the Javascript imagebox
      work.  I do not want to frustrate those who worked on that,
      but unfortunately I do not consider the current solution to
      be good enough for our site.  We should be able to offer a
      much simpler solution.