On Sun, 28 May 2000, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:

> At 07:04 26.05.00 -0700, you wrote:
> >I plan to launch (in all humbleness though!) an "e-zine" about Squeak
> >and directly related technology (Comanche, Siren etc.)

Sounds cool.

> >It should be viewable in Scamper!
>
> <rant>
> However, to really attract me, you need either greatly improve Scamper
> or change the policy to restrict the web layout to what is viewable in
> Scamper.  To be honest, the main reason why I only rarely use the
> swiki is the look and view.  It's not only the ugly background color
> but also the font, the layout, well, everything.
> </rant>

Personally, I think the lime green background color is probably too
intense, but I don't think it's *that* bad.  (To be honest, I recently
painted my house this color. :-) )  I've seen worse on web pages,
e.g. magenta.  And it doesn't have to always be white or light
gray.  Generally, you don't want a background color to be too intense,
though... currently it's #ccff99, something like #ddeebb looks better to
me, a paler color.

The layout on some pages is poor, which is probably an inevitable result
of lots of people adding to them.  The pages which have kept a consistent
layout look pretty decent, though, such as the intro page and the FAQ
page.  (I'd like to clean up the All Projects page.)  I don't see any
problem with the fonts, except possibly that some headline fonts are
gratuitously large.  Using the default browser font seems like the right
thing to do.

Anyway, an e-zine with articles sounds like a good idea.

- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net