HTML/JavaScript obsessives wanted

Can we have flashing text and a marquee please?
And some animated GIFs

Honestly, my favourite bit of the internet was when everything was was white background, black text, blue hyperlinks and HRs.

It only went downhill after that....

Plain text ftw

So one thing that has really occurred to me since getting an iPhone and an Android and spending time downloading apps and surfing the web... we've got it wrong.

What I mean by that is that I never got why apps existed because very few utilise enough of the phones functionality that they would need to be an application rather than a website.

I get it now. We use apps because they are simple, and they strip away un-needed crap, and they are instantly available.

So basically... we use apps because web design let us down. The web page is now cluttered with so much crap that isn't needed that we opt to use apps to simplify the experience and to make things easier.

With that in mind, the next version LFGSS is going to be an exercise in removing things.

Example... horizontal rule between posts... why? An image indicating whether a post is new, is there not a better way to do this that doesn't require downloading an image? Avatars, could we consider removing them and would it improve the experience... if not, maybe we should use inline images in the HTML to reduce the number of downloads and increase the page rendering speed? Typography, is this text as easy to read as it could be? Embedded links to other sites, are video embeds needed? Could we simplify how they're present?

And that's before we consider the overhaul to the header and footer to include nothing more than is needed.

I get it now... the web experience should be the lightest, faster and most simple experience possible. Elegantly stream-lined. And if it is that... then an app shouldn't be needed. But whilst LFGSS continues to be a pretty complex web app the need for a mobile interface or even for apps exists.

So instead of creating mobile interfaces and apps... I'm going to focus on massively simplifying the web site itself.

Honestly, my favourite bit of the internet was when everything was was white background, black text, blue hyperlinks and HRs.

It only went downhill after that....

noob.
It was all grey background when I were a lad.

Keep avatars - they are very useful ways of identifying people and are easier to remember than a name. A fair number of people when I met them recognised the avatar but not the name.

You need something visual to distinguish posts, quotes, etc, but it doesn't need to use images.

For new posts / unread posts etc, the images currently used are meaningless, and you could do better with "new!" as styled text.

For the images you do need, combine as many as you can into as few GIFs as possible and use CSS sprites to reduce downloads. As for HTML and CSS, use as little as you can possibly get away with. Get rid of all the tables, needless divs, etc.

With videos, embeds do slow things down, especially on a Mac running Safari. If you're going with HMTL5 then you could see if HTML5 video embedding is faster.

Velocio, maybe that's why I prefer the website to an app or mobile theme?

Truth is that most apps offer a limited subset of what the websites already offer, and I think that is the browsers on mobile devices were more capable (the n900 is a step in the right direction), dedicated weren't needed.

But then again they're a great way to impose stuff on people, see the apple app SDK and flash war, the ever changing terms and conditions to develop for the platform, etc.

Apps ... I hate them so much that I cannot bring myself to use that iShite stuff.
My next machine won't be Apple anymore, that's for sure.

Yup pascalo. that's how I feel. I don't like the mobile skin I'm using as it's a subset of functionality of the full website and because phone browsers are near to rivalling the ability of desktop browsers.

But I do see the merit in acknowledging that HTTP requests have an overhead that degrade the experience, and that on a small screen a lot of the page is totally superfluous to the functionality desired (to communicate).

So what I'd rather do instead of consider an app, or have a reduced mobile thing... is just make the main website cleaner and faster... fewer requests and less clutter. So that it becomes even more effortless to use on any device.

fewer requests is always a good thing.
Sprites, concat and minification ... you should be able to end up with minimum amount of files really.

As to how that translates to screen real estate is obviously a completely different thing and more of a design issue.
On smaller devices I don't think a mobile theme would be too bad as long as it would lave the original functionality available. Then again on my n900 I just zoom in and it's quite good really.

iPhone browser = good enough for full site
Android browser = good enough for full site
Blackberry browser = poo, but with Opera it's good enough for full site
Windows Mobile browser = poo, but with Opera it's good enough for full site

So if the full site is good enough, how to make it more useful on a mobile? Really I think it comes down to page width... the BBC have this lovely thing in which the content column is the width of the device it's being viewed on if that is smaller than the page width. So as long as posts fit nicely into page width and don't require zooming to read the text, then this is a good approach I think.

So... simplify and shorten the header... use different style sheets for horizontal or vertical layout depending on screen space. Make content fit the space available... perhaps move the user info above the post rather than to the left of the post so that content can be as wide as the screen. Put more useful links in the footer. So when you're down there you can get to other key places much easier.

Right, we have a github repository.

Soon (this weekend) I will put up some basic files that show which templates exist and how they are included and what they contain.

The repository is to be found over here:
http://github.com/buro9/LFGSS

For now (this week), those wanting to help should make sure that they have git installed and know how to use it. Work will start slowly over the next few weeks and then ramp up to full speed in mid-late September with a deadline of implementing by end of September (very rapid turn-around).

I wish I had time to help out on this, it sounds like a fun project.

Are you planning on rewriting a lot of the back-end code, or is it just template work?

Just template work. There's only a few weeks in which it will happen.

A designer / coder I aint, but I am a whizz with the backend infrastructure, saw nginx mentioned previously, if you need any assistance with that side of things, give me a prod, i'm in between jobs and bored of tidying up my shelves.