From xie at yihui.name  Tue Feb 21 23:23:27 2012
From: xie at yihui.name (Yihui Xie)
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:23:27 -0600
Subject: [Rd] Jazzing up the Task Views index page
In-Reply-To: <505400AF-CFEE-4B07-B269-07DF6A9A0157@xs4all.nl>
References: <CANVKczPAoruV7iC4PHLc9PtyZmBYustZf1v4v_U-KhTtaq8yyQ@mail.gmail.com>
	<505400AF-CFEE-4B07-B269-07DF6A9A0157@xs4all.nl>
Message-ID: <CANROs4foe4ForWi-WzJXtJqdVegWp-2WTSYFaq3vnNcEMKyaeQ@mail.gmail.com>

Actually I was also thinking about the R homepage last time when Barry
brought up this task view issue. The R website seems like an extreme
outlier among websites of many other programming languages. It is so
difficult to find another website today which still uses <frameset>,
and the whole site is almost plain text. Perhaps I have been pampered
by modern web designs. I wish I could do something about it, but I do
not have much spare time, and I do not know if R core is really
willing to change it. R is good at graphics, but the graphics in R
website...

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Berend Hasselman <bhh at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> On 21-02-2012, at 13:58, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>
>> A little while ago here we had a short discussion about Task Views - I
>> think ignited by someone saying 'how many times do I have to say "have
>> you read the Optimisation Task View?"?' and I poured some fuel on that
>> fire by saying "Task Views" was a stupid name.
>>
>> Anyway, I did say that Task Views were rather brilliant, but were let
>> down by their hidden position on the R web sites (tucked away as the
>> third element of a sub-menu of a CRAN mirror site linked to by the
>> CRAN link from the Download menu on the main R home page). The index
>> page is rather plain, so I designed a more engaging one. The result of
>> my effort is now here:
>>
>> http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/R/TaskViews/
>>
>> Having done that, I even considered that something like that could
>> replace the R Homepage. Giving new visitors an idea of the vast range
>> of techniques and application areas available in R would seem to be
>> better than the current graphic which has been there since perhaps
>> 2004.
>>
>> Comments, thoughts, flames, etc?
>
> Looks really nice. I think you did a very good job.
> Two suggestions:
>
> 1. make each image the same hight.
> 2. make each box the same height and width. Would be more restful to the eyes. It's a bit chaotic now.
>
> Something similar for the R home page would be very nice.
>
> Berend
>
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[Rd] Jazzing up the Task Views index page
Yihui Xie