acl-anthology
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Front Page
Now that the early CL years have been expanded, horizontal space on the front page is tighter than ever. Our current layout is also not going to scale. I am playing around how to reformat the front page, and have come up with this:
- https://aclweb.org/anthology/index_test1.html
It's not quite right—the tabs should maybe be vertical, and definitely smaller, and the relative font sizes are off, but it could be a step in the right direction. I solicit comments (and feel free to register explicit dislike).
With your current suggestion, everyone who's looking for proceedings other than ACL has to click at least twice—I think the most common use case (for the landing page table) is that people want to see what the most recent proceedings are, or find some particular recent event. Therefore, I think the more useful view would be to see all proceedings of, say, the current decade, with the option to click somewhere to go further back by decades.
I might code up an example when I have the time.
That's a good observation—I like that idea. It also solves the horizontal width problem better.
Another option is for older years to be grouped together: e.g., have a single link to a single page for all of ACL 1995-1999; likewise for everything before the year 2000. It would take the same number of clicks as now to get to an older paper, but would require more scrolling/searching.
I wouldn't worry about the number of clicks. I tend to agree with Steve Krug: "it doesn’t matter how many times we have to click, as long as each is an easy choice." Personally I'd much rather click on the event acronym first, then on the year, rather than scan a long and heterogenous list (or a large and heterogenous table) for the right link.
The link in the OP doesn't work.
~It does have a big impact if you're on a slow connection, for example.~(That didn't really make sense. I misremembered what Matt's example looked like.)
I have tried coding up an example, by the way, but it has turned out to be trickier than I thought (CSS-wise), so I haven't got anything to show just yet.
I don't understand why the start page switches to the mobile layout at the width it currently does. I already have to scroll the two tables but it is shown in the normal (non-stacked) design. If I reduce the browser width just a bit, it switches to the stacked layout. This should probably addressed as well as part of a redesign. (Noticed when reviewing #443)
Just to clarify @akoehn, you feel it should switch to stacked layout sooner?
I think the width of the tables just barely worked when the new design was introduced, but already kind of broke after we refactored the CL 1974-1978 volumes into separate years...
I don't think know but currently the switch does not correspond to any meaningful width of the site. I would probably like to have the switch later as the stacked layout looks kind of weird on a laptop or desktop and it currently switches when I have a half-width browser.
I played around with some ideas for the front page and made some sketches, two of which I'd like to share.
- Exhibit One follows the same layout idea as the current front page, but uses regular Bootstrap styling and makes the table scroll horizontally. I think this works, but my fear is that horizontally scrolling tables might not be very intuitive.
- Exhibit Two introduces another plug-in, DataTables, to make a more verbose venues table that is sortable and searchable on-the-fly. It currently draws from
venues.yaml, meaning that all venues defined there can be found from the front page, not just the ones we currently define as "top-level". It also looks much busier, though.
Important caveats: I haven't optimized for smaller viewports yet; I haven't included SIGs yet; and in general I wanted to figure out which general direction the front page could take before fine-tuning any details. I'd love to get some feedback on what you like or dislike about these ideas, and then iterate from there.
(On a technical note, in both of these examples I got rid of the hard-coded year ranges in the template and made sure they'll work without needing any error-prone manual adjustments with each new year.)
Thanks @mbollmann—I think horizontal scrolling is confusing, but something along the lines of Exhibit Two could work.
It might also be nice to have a way to browse by decade.
Thanks, this is awesome to see some progress on!
I agree with @nschneid that we should move away from horizontal scrolling.
For Exhibit 2, I like:
- The layout: the ACL icon for ACL venues, plus the display of the acronym and the full venue name
- The filtering is also nice
One suggestions: I don't like the numbered paging very much. What about adding some semantics to the paging—e.g., alphabetic ranges, or venue type? I'm not sure exactly what these would be. Using existing categories, we could do something like {ACL, important non-ACL, workshops}. We could also add new metadata, such as venue keywords, or "defunct", etc. I guess "semantic paging" is kind of like tabs.
I think DataTables can be configured to use (vertical) scrolling instead of paging, I might try this out.
Re the semantic navigation, this is really orthogonal to paging/scrolling, but what's easy is having buttons that filter the table for specific things (like venue types). It might also be nice to get #1164 done first to have more explicit metadata, e.g. have "journals" as a category as well.
I guess I am in the minority -- I think horizontal scrolling is fine, and like that the current layout and #1 vertically aligns years and fits a lot more information into the same space.
FWIW I also really like the simplicity and overview of the horizontal design, and also think the navigation is fine iff you know how it works (e.g. shift+scrolling on desktop). It just might not be intuitive to many, and it's currently quite restrictive in how many venues it's showing (e.g. not clear how to navigate to "BlackboxNLP" workshop if that's what you're looking for – while you simply start typing "black" in ex. 2 and it's there).