I set out to do a quick and dirty typography overhaul to make things
more consistent and a bit cleaner, but I kept running into things I
didn't like, so this lead me down something of a rabbit hole of design
tweaks to the OSM site.
Goals here are to have better content hierarchy, better vertical
rhythm, more consistent UI, cleaner markup with less tables, all while
keeping the basics pretty much intact. There are a lot of things I
didn't touch even though they need to be updated (lots of tables where
stuff shouldn't be tables, mostly).
Basic overview of changes:
I added a new persistent header that helps segment pages. It's now
a lot easier to know what you're looking at. The header has a page
title, a description, plus a submenu of actions.
There is now a pattern of 20px/10px margins and padding for more
rhythm and breathing room throughout the site.
I know there are other problems here or things I've missed - would
love another set of eyes to look over this! I am still getting comfortable
working on the site - it's my first time ever digging into a ruby or rails
so I'm not familiar with the templating language yet.
This lookup wasn't actually doing what the comment said it was doing
and I don't see any reason to output the previous details of the object
for a delete action.
Having a table with a column called ID that is only part of the
primary key really doesn't work as rails likes to treat ID as a
special name so it becomes impossible to assign to it or read it.
Add a map to the changeset list page, with a bounding box for each
changeset and highighting when the mouse is placed over either a box
on the map or a row of the table.
Make any request for a changeset feed with a page argument redirect
to the version with no page argument and ensure that any RSS links on
the HTML version of the changeset list don't have a page argument.
in the description. So adjust the code that creates the changeset
browser title/description to emit a XHTML and plaintext version with
the HTML and Atom output can use, respectively.
Also:
* Split up @title into @title and @heading as elsewhere
* Turn the username on the user / user+bbox browser into a link to the userpage
* Say "Changesets" instead of "Recent changes". Unlike Wikipedia the changes on OSM aren't guaranteed to be recent, they're just going to be the latest
