Open Designs

Open Designs Forum » Site Specific

31. Wolfgang
    Member

    @Christopher -- well, I have to be on my way again. Thanks for the exchange of thoughts and hearing your opinion! Great you are on the OD team. Keep it up, and thanks for donating so many of your free-time hours for this project (including answering stubborn postings by me) :peace:

    Posted 5 years ago #

32. Christopher
    Moderator

    It's good to have you hear openly (no pun intended hehe) sharing your thoughts :smile:

    Posted 5 years ago #

33. Gnome
    Moderator

    /me sent him an email using the email function here, (I hope it works) because his website has no way to contact him.

    Posted 5 years ago #

34. megadeth
    Member

    I thought I would revive this post. My recommendations are:

    1. Offer a wider range of licenses
    2. Possibly require the design to be tested in IE6/IE7, FF1/2, and O8/9
    3. Font size should be expressed in em's instead of pixels.

    More coming soon! :bigsmile:

    Posted 5 years ago #

35. Gnome
    Moderator

    you can't require people to use proprietary software (IE).

    Posted 5 years ago #

36. megadeth
    Member

    That isn't what I said! :fierce: I only meant to have it tested in IE since it holds over two-thirds of the market share.

    Posted 5 years ago #

37. VirtualFunction
    Member

    Hi, I've just submitted a design that's about 206Kb zipped. I know this sounds big compared to the guidelines here, but it includes the PSD. I believe / feel this is quite an important thing to distribute with the template as it allows the for full modification of the template (and means graphics are not lossy when distributed, when compared to JPG's). While I am aware that you need to conserve bandwidth, I think it's important to allow authors the space to distribute things like the original PSD's as this is in-keeping with the open source philosophy (that is the PSD file is source from which the template was created / derived). Could you clarify if exceptions can be made for people who provide things like PSD's, provided the design it's self is not huge or over bloated from a practical point of view.

    Posted 5 years ago #

38. VirtualFunction
    Member

    Oh, another thing, the design I submitted seems to have gone live, but the screen shot is pure black. I now the theme was called "Night Glow", but that takes it to the extreme :P I'mm just guessing this is because the template screen shot needs to be created / moderated.

    Posted 5 years ago #

39. bcwood
    Member

    megadeth, I agree with you - requiring designs to be tested in IE is just being realistic, since that's what the majority of people use. And since IE has some "interesting" CSS bugs, it is especially important to test your designs in IE. You can have a design that fully validates, looks great in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc, and still not look right in IE.

    Posted 5 years ago #

40. Sean
    Founding Member

    @VirtualFunction: Since we are working on the backend, once in a while screen shots get captured wrong as with the black screen you saw on your preview on the home page, which is now fixed by the way ;) As for your design size, do not include PSD files if it's going to go way over the limitations... instead put a link in your template to the source psd file on your site or server (if you have one).

    Posted 5 years ago #

41. Gnome
    Moderator

    I agree That designs should be tested in IE, but you can't require it. One of my designs looks terrible in IE, because it uses :before and :after to round corners. I 'tested' it in IE and it didn't work, but I don't care. I am trying to show you that the community can't force designs to be cross-platform, especially because IE is so terribly coded.

    Posted 5 years ago #

42. megadeth
    Member

    I'm not saying that everything in your template has to look identical in Firefox and IE, but it should at least be viewable in IE and not full of bugs.

    Posted 5 years ago #

43. Sean
    Founding Member

    @megadeth: by design, IE is buggy and even the latest IE7 has a ton of issues. People are already working on IE7 CSS hacks.

    Posted 5 years ago #

44. megadeth
    Member

    Yeah, I know. Aren't most things made from Microsoft buggy though?

    Posted 5 years ago #

45. Gnome
    Moderator

    Not all of them. Windows 2000 works perfectly. (after SP4)

    Posted 5 years ago #

46. Sean
    Founding Member

    Machines running P3 processors and Windows 2000 are really stable. Intel made the P3's really well and Microsoft had a brain fart with Windows 2000 SP4 and made it really stable :boogie:

    Posted 5 years ago #

47. Gnome
    Moderator

    That's what most of the machines at my school are: PIII 900MHz, 256MB ram, 20GB HDD, and Windows 2000 SP4, patched to anything pre-september.

    Posted 5 years ago #

48. yugnats
    Member

    Posted By: seanMachines running P3 processors and Windows 2000 are really stable.

    agreed. i have a few clients running this setup and their machines are as reliable as(gulp!) any linux box i've experienced.

    Posted 5 years ago #

49. Sean
    Founding Member

    To bring this thread alive again since a lot of questions are being asked in other threads... design submission guidelines: Rules being things like the following: - No text in images - Only Valid XHTML - Max size of 150/200kb unzipped. Recommendations being things like: - keep images optimized, keep file size small - use semantic markup, div-itius is just as bad as table layout When unzipped, designs must fall into the following directory structure: - Design_Name/index.html - Design_Name/this.html - And so on... - Special characters like "Design Name/index.html" and "Cool!/index.html" are not allowed. - If links in the design are not functional, link them back to index.html. - No buttons (includes w3 buttons). - Only submit designs for which you hold copyrights. For designs with images: - No text is allowed in images (so that it can be used without an image editor). - Images must be royalty free.

    Posted 5 years ago #

50. Christopher
    Moderator

    Sorry to stir this up a bit, but this is confusing (it's also meant to be quite light-hearted and not too serious)... Max size of 150/200kb unzipped. <- I understand this fine... The combined size of all images must be less than 60KB. <- But whats this all about?! So I have a 200kb unzipped design, but am only allowed 60kb of images, so that leaves me with 140kb for the index.html file, along with the stylesheet... am I the only one that laughed at that :updown: p.s. I know some designs have 5+ layouts, reusing images, so the kb of the extra index.html and extra styles could add up... but it still sound weird without explanation as to why the image limit is so low compared with the overall limit

    Posted 5 years ago #

51. Jeremy
    Member

    just my two cents here... i think that designs that contain one layout should have the < 200kb rule, and there should be an increased limit for multiple layout designs. and yeah i think the image limit might need a little boost.

    Posted 5 years ago #

52. sofaspud
    Member

    As far as IE testing goes, perhaps there could be "compatibility specs" that accompany every design. For instance, you could list the different browsers and the templates compatibility with them: Compatibility:

    • IE 6: Poor
    • IE 7: Below Average
    • Firefox: Excellent
    • Opera: Excellent
    • .
    • .

    Get the idea?

    Posted 5 years ago #

53. Sean
    Founding Member

    @Christopher: The part where I had "The combined size of all images must be less than 60KB" was an oops and I removed that part from my comment. I was borrowing from the old OWD design guidelines but LobsterMan and I with others in the beginning of the thread said a total cap of 200 KB, so that's what the number is. The 60 KB is for OWD. Sorry for the confusion.

    Posted 5 years ago #

54. Christopher
    Moderator

    hehe no problemo, i thought it was most likely a mis print but had to bring it up to check anyway :)

    Posted 5 years ago #

55. nelchee
    Member

    One question: my templates validate as Strict, but recently I started adding a Transitional DTD instead because some users may not know how to keep a valid Strict page. Those experienced may change the DTD as they wish. Which do I choose then when I submit?

    Posted 5 years ago #

56. LobsterMan
    Key Master

    The one that appears in the DTD should be the one you select.

    Posted 5 years ago #

57. Gnome
    Moderator

    sofaspud: good idea. I think the concept of browser compatibility should factor in somehow, and there are so many ways to do it.

    Posted 5 years ago #

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