Re: html manual +css

[Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>]

> On Dec 26, 2019, at 7:03, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Ok, so I have something that works both ways:
>> 
>> 1) when the display is wide enough to have the full horizontal menu, the
>> menu is displayed horizontally and follows the scrolling.
>> 
>> 2) when the display is not wide enough to have the full horizontal menu, the
>> menu is displayed on the right side of the screen, as a list of links, with
>> "icons" before the link names to hint at their use, and the menu sticks to
>> its original position.
> 
> Looks great on my desktop, thanks,
> 
>> Would you mind checking if that works as you intended ?
> 
> It does.  I just now tried to look at the page from a phone and it looks
> identical,

Well that was not intended. The result was good when looking at the page from a "phone" developer mode in Firefox/Safari but on a real phone it was not the intended result.

You can see what I intended to do by reducing the width of your desktop browser window until you see the modification.

> which I guess is good (indeed in pixels, my desktop's browser
> and my phone's browser (when the phone is in portrait position) have
> about the same number of pixels), but it makes the site difficult to
> read on my phone (I have to zoom on the various parts to read them ;-)
> It's definitely no worse than what we currently have on gnu.org, tho!

Indeed.

> It's more readable when I put my phone in landscape, but then this first
> line menu ends up using a large fraction of my screen real estate so
> I wouldn't want it to always stay on-screen.

:) And that's what I tried to avoid.

> [ I guess this is the only part which I could consider a regression
>  compared to what we currently have on gnu.org.  And it's a result of
>  what I asked for (and like) when reading on a desktop.  Oh well!  ]

But that is something we can achieve. I'm just brushing up the CSS skills that I had 20 years ago and the technology has evolved a huge lot to answer the needs of mobile browsers. Maybe you've heard the term already, it is called "responsive design" and it aims at making a page flow better when the form is constrained by smaller displays.

> To clarify: it's never occurred to me to look at such docs on my phone,
> so it's probably not an important use case.

No, it is. Especially when you want to *read* the manual/reference.

I'll get back to the list with a useable proposal. Sorry for the noise.

>        Stefan "whose phone's browser has more pixels than his desktop's"

Same here. It's my first mobile phone in about 10 years. I'm shocked at how fast things have changed. Although I was just thinking that the maximum 1kb offset of the charset declaration from the beginning of an HTML file is the same amount of useable memory my ZX81 had when I bought it about 40 years ago...

Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune