Bug#290187: www.debian.org: packages.debian.org recently got uglier in non-CSS browsers

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 10:23:48AM +0100, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 01:42:28AM -0500, Brian Sammon wrote:
> > This change has happened in the past week or two, as far as I can tell; I
> > look at packages.debian.org at least once or twice a week.
> > When I look at a package info page with my non-CSS browser, where it used to
> > display a graphical bullet color-coded to the type of dependency, now it
> > just displays [dep] or [sug] or [rec].  This makes it take me longer to scan
> > the page to determine which dependencies I am interested in.
> > 
> > You can see this if you use the "dillo" browser.
> > Has a decision been made to only support CSS browsers?
> 
> In this case I wouldn't have cared to actually add the [dep], would
> I? ;)
> 
> Seriously speaken it just didn't occur to me that one would think of that
> as really harder to scan (and for the non-CSS text browsers it doesn't
> makes a difference, anyway). But I see your point.
> 
> What do you think about something like
> http://packages.debian.net/unstable/graphics/scribus ? I replaced the
> [dep] string with the image and put the [dep] into the alt attribute.
> It doesn't look really nice because of the linebreak after the image
> but I only can change that with CSS.

Please note also that the new layout is less Lynx-friendly because it
adds vertical space.  Entries are now in the form:
  <ol>
    <li>[dep] <dl><dt>package name</dt><dd>package description</dd></dl></li>
    ...
  </ol>
It may be replaced by
  <dl>
    <dt>[dep] package name</dt><dd>package description</dd>
    ...
  </dl>
where [dep] is rendered like now by an alt attribute or hidecss.

This also applies for the download table, it is much longer than before
and is pretty annoying.  In order to be usable, rows and cols have to
be swapped, i.e. display would look like
     Arch    List of files   Size    Installed size
    alpha   [list of files]   200         500
     arm    [list of files]   200         500
    ...
It is then readable with Lynx, but looks surely ugly with graphical
browsers, so you may be reluctant to perform such a change.  In this
case, please at least move this table below
  Search for other versions of <package>
so that we do not have to scroll down to read useful information, or
move it to a dedicated 'download' page.

Denis