Re: pgarchives new design review

Hi

On Fri, 29 Jul 2022 at 14:55, Sahil Harpal <sahilharpal1234(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> Hi Dave,
>
> On Fri, 29 Jul 2022 at 15:49, Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>
>> I have a few comments, based on a quick look:
>> - The site is unusable if Javascript is disabled in the browser.
>> PostgreSQL websites have a general requirement that JS should be optional,
>> not a requirement.
>>
>
> Oh! I was not actually aware of this. There are JS files that are already
> in use and present in the media/js directory so I thought it won't be a
> problem. Otherwise we need to use normal tables only. Do you have any
> suggestions for this?
>

We can (and do) use Javascript for a nicer experience for the majority of
users. However, we need it to still be usable if a user does not have
Javascript enabled.

The buttons on https://www.postgresql.org/download/ are a good example. If
Javascript is disabled, they act as regular links that will take you to a
new page with the same content that you would see inline if Javascript were
enabled. Of course, that's not the only way to handle the problem. One way
might be to leave regions expanded by default, and to collapse them if JS
is enabled (if you can do that before the full page renders, so it doesn't
look weird).

>
> - There is different styling on different buttons. For example, the
>> numbered buttons for by-day paging look quite different from the
>> previous/next buttons, which have a thicker border and what appears to be a
>> different background colour.
>>
>> - The thread paging buttons have different styling again (and are using a
>> shade of blue which is outside of our normal palette I believe).
>>
>> - The blue used for the on-hover row highlighting also seems unnatural.
>> Perhaps a light grey would work better here?
>>
>> - Perhaps the Previous/Next buttons should be at either end of the
>> "per-day" buttons, rather than on a separate row?
>>
>
> Alright, the above points can be resolved easily. I will make changes
> accordingly.
>

Thanks.

>
> - The lists of messages are (intentionally) a lot more compact in the
>> current design. The new design looks nice, but would require a *lot* more
>> scrolling as each row is now at least two lines of text. I wonder if
>> there's a way to keep at least some of the compact-ness, whilst still
>> making it look nicer.
>>
>
> I think users would not require to scroll much. Like in the new design we
> have an option to set max entries to be displayed. So we can set max
> entries to lets say 10 and then just jump/switch to different pages one by
> one.
> But still I am open to any new layout that we can use to keep at least
> some of the compact-ness.
>

Maybe :-). That setting seems to be per-day though, and is not persisted
(and is at the bottom of each day, so you'd have to scroll to change it).

One pattern I often use is to visit a page and use the browsers search
function to find a message (if I know it was from the last couple of
days for example). The current design would break that, so I'm not in
favour of hiding rows anyway.

--
Dave Page
Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com