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Pavol Rusnak wrote:
| I found out that Ubuntu has nice way to promote their new release -
| small banner which informs how many days are left before new version is
| out. See http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/countdown for details. This
| banner also links to information page about distribution features and
| _mainly_ to beta releases which can attract more testers. I think it
| would be nice if openSUSE had something similar. I would created it by
| myself but unfortunately I don't have time right now.
And this one is rendered on server-side (just a small PHP script),
localized (*) depending on the browser locale and doesn't require any
javascript at all:
http://v3nus.homelinux.net:13000/
(thanks to jimmac for the design, translations have been contributed by
many on IRC)
(*) I already have en, de, fr, nl, it, se, pl, ru, el, da, nb, sv, fi,
cs, hr -- if you have another language to contribute... :)
I think that server-side rendering has some advantages:
- - pixel precision: Javascript based ones are screwed as soon as the user
zooms the font
- - doesn't require any Javascript support at all, it's just a plain PNG
- - can be localized from the HTTP headers sent by the browser (as any
website); you can't do that with Javascript, unfortunately
- - can render with the official, non-free openSUSE font (Cholla) as its
drawn on the template on the server and doesn't require that font to be
present on users' hosts (which isn't the case for obvious reasons)
- - less bytes to download (no Javascript, no jquery)
Downsides:
- - doesn't render quite as nicely as a browser does as the gd2 PHP image
functions don't do antialiasing (but I don't think it's that much worse,
judge for yourself)
- - positioning isn't exactly as good as a browser's CSS engine either,
have to compute everything on my own, pixel by pixel on the server-side
(doable though, I'm just a little lazy to code all that)
- - doesn't have the nice fade-in effect jimmac implements in his
Javascript version (top left on the URL above)
Thanks to darix, we could have that stuff up on countdown.opensuse.org
quickly.
Only TODOs remaining:
- - your feedback (yes, you ;))
- - more translations
- - code singular support (which is quite tricky in some languages such as
russian (thanks to Coolo for pointing that out), or even czech)
Comments ?
cheers
- --
~ -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
~ /\\