Responsive-design Create Entries page, joining/leaving communities, subscribing/granting access, etc

[denise]

This code push included responsive redesigns of:

* the beta create entries page
* joining/leaving communities
* subscribing or granting access to people
* many of the site admin areas
* everything in the /tools directory
* and many more.

If you have problems with any of these pages, this is the place to report the problems!




There are several purposes behind our responsive site redesign. Aside from the boring technical ones (making it easier for us to maintain and troubleshoot the code, reducing browser incompatability, giving us more options in terms of designing, etc), the two big ones are:

* Improve the way the site looks and feels on small screens (such as on tablets and mobile devices) without worsening the experience for people using large screens (desktops and laptops).

* Improve the accessibility of the site: make it easier to access the site with screenreaders, interact with the site using alternate input devices, interact with the site using only the mouse or only the keyboard, etc.

This entry is for two things: reporting any actual display bugs or glitches with the pages (in your browser, whether on your computer or on your mobile device), and providing aesthetic feedback about the look and feel of the design.

If you're reporting display bugs or glitches: Please describe the glitch in as much detail as possible. Screenshots would be really helpful, especially if you're only seeing the glitch in one browser but not another, or only on your phone but not on your laptop. (You don't have to check for the glitch on multiple devices, but if you do, let us know which devices have the problem and which don't.)

If you have feedback specifically about the aesthetics or the look of the redesign (you think something needs more padding, want to suggest a different font/color/color combination/background/what-have-you, think something is in the wrong place, that kind of thing): Please be as specific as possible about what you think needs to be changed, or what's bugging you about the way things look. For instance, instead of saying "the header is so ugly and squished now, change it back", say "On my computer, the links in the header don't have enough space between them, so they look like they're running into each other."

(We know that people definitely have strong opinions about the way things should look -- that's why we're doing this incrementally -- but the most helpful feedback is the kind that's specific, concrete, and actionable.)

With all feedback, include the following:

* Which site skin you're using (you can find this on the Display tab of Manage Settings if you don't know)
* What browser and browser version you're seeing the problem in
* What operating system you're using
* What type of device you're using: laptop, desktop, phone, tablet, e-reader, etc. (And if phone/tablet/e-reader, what make and model.)
* What your display resolution is, and what your current browser size is. To check this if you aren't sure: go to whatsmy.browsersize.com and report the following numbers: Browser window width, browser window height, screen width, screen height.

If you're specifically reporting an issue with how the redesign works (or doesn't!) in your assistive technology setup, please also include:

* What assistive technology you're using (name of program, description of setup, etc)
* If it's software, the software version
* If it's workflow related (you find it difficult to navigate using keyboard-only navigation, for instance), a brief description of your workflow and what about the page is making it difficult

Comments

[lizvogel]

Beta Create Entries page: When I click the Browse tags button, the entry posts. Yes, just like that. I can't browse tags at all.

Edited to add: The Browse button for icons does the same thing (immediately posts the entry, instead of browsing). Also, when I select an icon (from the drop-down list, obviously), it doesn't display anywhere on the Create Entries page.

site skin: Tropospherical Purple
browser: Opera 10.00 (Yes, it's old; no, I don't want to upgrade it. The fact that I don't have to be on the front horse of the upgrade-merry-go-round has always been one of the big pluses of Dreamwidth.)
operating system: WinXP
type of device: laptop
display resolution: 1280x800 (No idea about browser size; whatismy.browsersize.com won't load?)


Regarding the new Create Entries page in general: Is there a way to make it less, um... big and ugly and IN YOUR FACE? (Sorry about the caps, but that's what looking at the beta Create Entries page now feels like.) A way *without* changing the default font for the entire site, that is? I don't particularly want to shrink everything else on DW just to get the Create Entries page reined in. And it's not just the font size, anyway. The boxes feel awkward, the colors hurt my eyes, the +/- to expand/shrink (and the X to remove a tag) are now little vertical lines that are very hard to click....

[fu]

Hmmm, for the issues you brought up in your first paragraph, it sounds almost like the JS didn't load properly. Could you try force-reloading the page and ese if that fixes it?

[lizvogel]

Tried a forced-reload (my browser also clears the cache when I shut down, FWIW), but the problem continues.

Don't know if this helps, but all the non-Browse buttons seem to be working as they should, including the Random icon button. It's only icon Browse and tag Browse that seem confused about their purpose in life, as far as I can determine.

[denise]

About Opera 10 -- unfortunately, it's outside our browser support policy (which is, basically: full functional support for any version of Chrome/Firefox/Safari/IE released in the last 18 months and "as functional as possible" support for any version of those released in the last 36 months and any browser responsible for 5% or more of our traffic). Opera as a whole is 1.25% of our traffic, and Opera 10 is 0.67% of that 1.25% -- low enough numbers that it's very plausible you might be the only one using it, actually.

Even then, we do try to fix "this is really broken" type bugs like the browse buttons not working, but in this case, we've been asking: we don't have anybody working in DW development with a copy of Opera 10 (there's one more person who might who I still haven't checked with, but I may be misremembering) who might be able to look into the problem, and Opera doesn't make older versions of their browsers available for download -- we've been looking. The only places we can find it for download are really dodgy sites that nobody wants to download anything from.

We'll do a bit of research to see if we can find an obvious solution, but I'm afraid we can't spend too much time on it, and I can't guarantee that we'll be able to fix it. I'm really sorry.

[lizvogel]

I still have the original setup file for Opera 10. Don't know how dependent it is on additional files pulled from the Opera website, but I'd be happy to email it if somebody wanted to give it a try.

I'm curious: What changed about the Browse buttons with the "responsive design" update? Because they worked fine before that.

[denise]

The good news is, one of our people has Opera 12, which is also manifesting the problem! She's going to poke at it a bit and see if she can figure out a fix. Again, I can't promise anything, but we'll give it a try.

('What changed' is actually 'quite a lot', really, but the current theory is that version of Opera is too old to support some of the JavaScript being used. We'll try to figure out a fallback.)

[lizvogel]

So glad to hear someone's still poking at it!

[lizvogel]

Update as of the last update: the +/- are back to being +/-, which is nice.

The Browse Tags button no longer posts the entry. Unfortunately, it also doesn't browse tags. What is does do is disable the Preview, Spell Check, and Post buttons.

The Browse Icons button does still post the entry. (Which was a useful thing in this test case, as it was the only way I could get the Create Entries page to do anything at that point. But it's not, I think, ideal functionality, eh?)

Additional data: If I edit an existing entry, the Browse Tags button saves the entry. So it's working differently on Create vs. Edit.

[denise]

Yeah, unfortunately the problem turns out to be specific to older versions of Opera, and since that's outside our browser support policy, we won't be fixing it. I'm sorry.

[lizvogel]

Registering deep unhappiness about this, just for the record.

[denise]

I'm really sorry. We can't keep supporting older browsers forever, and usage of the versions of Opera affected by this is low enough to not trigger our "unless it's widely used" exemption in our browser support policy.