in reply to Documentation for POE?

The worst thing about POE is their website. It's very bland. Sometimes I feel like yelling when I think about how terrible Perl programmers can be when it comes to web design. I will not point anyone by name, but you know who you are! Just google for gogopuffs and you will see what I mean. Thankfully, after far too many years, perl.apache.org and perl.org have new looks. Gee, guys ya think that was a good idea? Many of the younger generation like thinking of their languages as stylish and Perl does not put forth such an image at all. Just look at java.com, java.net or even php.net. Now I know someone will call me a troll and say "Perl is about getting the job done, not style or image. Perl is not pretty, it just gets the job done . . . blah, blah". Well, you can get the job done AND look good too. Personally, and I know that this statement will seem imflamatory, I believe that Perl attracts a lot of system administrators and in my experience, there is no other group on the planet that is worse at web design than system admins. This is just my opinion. Please let's not argue.

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Re: Re: Documentation for POE?
by hossman (Prior) on Aug 06, 2003 at 00:28 UTC

    I won't argue with you, but if you feel so strong about it then just edit the damn thing and make it look better.

    It is after all a publicly editable Wiki, so if you think it's ugly, make it pretty.

    (And then other people can complain about how it's got too much flash, and not enough substance, and I can chastise them for not adding content, and we'll get into a really nice positive feedback loop that will result in a constantly growing & sexy to look at site that will improve without bound for ever and ever....)

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      What a great design concept: Create an ugly site, but include a Wiki, so when people complain, you can tell them to fix it themselves. Brilliant.
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        It's better then creating a pretty site that you abandon and gets stale and provides poor and outdated documentation that find your site and have no way to update it.

        (I'm not a big fan of the whole Wiki concept, but it has it's major advantages, and this is one of them.)

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      Well, considering that the website looks to be dozens of pages in size and that the Wiki only gives you access to stuff between the opening and closing <body> tags, with each page using the same stylesheet that no one can change (global.css), I don't think it's reasonable to assume that anyone can just "edit it" and make it look "pretty."
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Re: Re: Documentation for POE?
by sri (Vicar) on Aug 06, 2003 at 00:01 UTC
    Not to flame, but I thought the same when I saw this the first time. :)
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