In several places I have mentioned my surprise at how archaic this site looks and feels - I know that for those of us who value the content, the connection with other Perl people and the discussion, the look and feel is worth the effort. But what about those outside The Monastery? Perl is considered old-fashioned, irrelevant and redundant to many people...right or wrong that is the way it is. Having one of the primary recourses for the language looking outdated does nothing to promote Perl's rightful place as a meaningful part of today's technology.

In no way do I mean to question the amazing work that has been done bringing this community into being or the fabulous contributions that continue to be made.

In another thread marto suggested it was more than trivial to convert the site to being mobile friendly - IMHO, the first stage of converting a legacy website to something more modern. So I thought I'd take a look at what was really needed to make a change...for a bit of fun and to, perhaps, generate some useful discussion.

I went back a decade to a node, sv_upgrade error that was being discussed in November 2010 for no other reason than 10 years is a nice round number! I copied the HTML source, changed the existing image and script paths from relative to absolute, added a little CSS and a little Javascript and produced a quick and dirty mockup which is pretty much identical on desktop but behaves marginally better on mobile. Note that it's not a truly responsive page as it doesn't properly transition from narrow to wide screen width unless it is reloaded.

I made the minimum changes I could which involved:

• Adding a viewport meta tag
• Converting a couple of deprecated HTML attributes (width mainly) to CSS
• Adding a block of CSS and a single Javascript function
• Adding a table cell containing a hamburger menu image to use on mobile

Less than a couple of hours in total to make what I consider a very slightly better mobile display.

Clearly this is just a conceptual idea - as The Monastery is built on a framework I have no idea what is involved in changing the source code that framework spits out and it would need much more then just a quick fix. However, from the comments I have seen scattered around, I'm not the only one who feels that this site no longer showcases Perl in the best way and any change in the right direction is probably a good thing.

If there is a move towards creating a responsive site, I am happy to contribute where I can although I am very much aware that my coding skills are very inferior to many others here. But I am eager to learn and to help.

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