Guardian Frontend – Source for the Guardian's responsive site

by danso • 13 years ago

237 49 13 years ago

lukasm2• 13 years ago

Am I the only one that thinks the publishers' websites are unbelievably ugly and cluttered ?

bradleyg_• 13 years ago

The responsive site is pretty nice imo, the link in the repo description is wrong: http://www.theguardian.com/uk?view=mobile

bassclef2• 13 years ago

yea, i clicked on the link from github and thought to myself, there is nothing responsive about this site. this is a bit different. Still not crazy about it.

lukasm2• 13 years ago

Responsive is awesome, but the number of extra information is increasing cognitive burden. Duplication and buttons like print (srly?).

ollysb• 13 years ago

I think it does a pretty good job of bringing the identity of the paper edition to the web. The spacing seems a bit tight but the typography is decent.

jbeja• 13 years ago

Yeah is ugly, but is more about the frontend package

vidarh2• 13 years ago

If you think The Guardian is ugly, look at this Norwegian newspaper: http://www.dagbladet.no/ (one of the largest ones)

(The scary thing: It's cleaner than it used to be - they've toned down the most excessive advertising)

dageshi• 13 years ago

The best improvement for me on this site was the ability to collapse certain sections. Personally, collapsing the flame bait comment is free section made the site immeasurably better.

freshyill• 13 years ago

Prepare for your life to get even better: http://stevenf.com/shutupcss

Doctor_Fegg• 13 years ago

Exactly that. I've been using a variant of that on the Guardian site for a while and it makes it so much better: http://www.systemed.net/blog/index.php?post=18

unfunco• 13 years ago

I think they need to work on their .gitignore file a little, for example: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/master/nginx/front... And also, there's cache fragments in the repository.

sjtgraham• 13 years ago

I'm sure they'd appreciate a pull request.

pmgarman• 13 years ago

They'd probably not accept the PR considering the comment on the key :) Looks to be intentionally included for local development

"this is a TEST key for local development - NOT an important key"

dchest• 13 years ago

Self-signed certificate, not a real one: http://i.imgur.com/35Szn2S.png

untog• 13 years ago

Yeah, I imagine that is used for testing SSL on dev boxes or similar.

jamesgorrie2• 13 years ago

Yip, it's just used for internal SSH testing. No harm to be done there.

maxst• 13 years ago

I heard they wanted to use WebP, but I don't see any?

kaelig8• 13 years ago

Thanks for your interest, we now use webp on the mobile site (look at your network tab in the dev tools: the mime type of most images should be image/webp).

slinkycurtis• 13 years ago

But do you think it's wise to keep the AWS keys in the public repository?

buro92• 13 years ago

This is wonderful.

LICENSE = Apache 2.0 https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/master/LICENSE

And then...

https://github.com/guardian/frontend/tree/master/resources/f...

They have put under Apache license their commissioned fonts which are normally available for a decent fee: https://commercialtype.com/typefaces/guardian https://commercialtype.com/typeface_images/guardian/Guardian...

This is extremely generous of the Guardian.

eterm2• 13 years ago

If this turns out to be erroneous, does anyone know what happens here? I assume that if it is clear error then the licensing won't be valid and they can revoke it?

dublinben2• 13 years ago

According to the Apache 2.0 license:

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.

kaelig8• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot for pointing out the problem of having those fonts within the Apache license. We will find a solution soon. Next time you see something like this, we'd appreciate it greatly if you emailed us instead.

buro92• 13 years ago

Sure thing, and I did glance through the github repo for an obvious contact point and couldn't see one. I figured you'd be reading HN and this would be dealt with far quicker by just posting here.

I haven't checked for other things but the same logic about protecting original licensed works should be borne in mind for any commissioned artwork, icon sets, widgets, third party items, fonts, etc.

An open-source version should go into the project (safe defaults that work), and the closed-source/licensed things should just be merged during deploy.

I only glanced for a few seconds, but custom icons and images are the other obvious areas of concern given it's your brand identity and you probably aren't open-sourcing that and have restrictions on how those assets are used.

dublinben2• 13 years ago

If the fonts have been distributed under an Apache license, can you just 'take them back?' I'm pretty sure they're free now.

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.

randomsearch• 13 years ago

This is extremely generous of the Guardian.

Yes. An academic researcher I know has also received helpful cooperation from the Guardian on using some of their code for benchmarking. They're good people.

kaelig8• 13 years ago

Thanks again for reporting this, we added a mention to our license:

All fonts are the property of Schwartzco, Inc., t/a Commercial Type (https://commercialtype.com/), and may not be reproduced without permission.

mattpointblank• 13 years ago

It's been open source (on this URL) since ~May 2012...

aduth• 13 years ago

They've likely been committing to a private repository and only recently made the source publicly available on GitHub.

kaelig8• 13 years ago

Matt works at the Guardian, and what he says is right: it's been an open source project since ~ May 2012.

ddebernardy3• 13 years ago

I'd like to praise the Guardian for their effort in making their site readable on a tablet.

The large font, the speed at which the page is rendered, and the ability to zoom into the article make it reasonable to not use Safari's Reader button. And keeping the functionality and usability of a normal site (e.g. instead of trying to slam a bizarre left to right pagination) is appreciated.

This is much better than the likes of OnSwipe or Slate.

kaelig8• 13 years ago

Thanks! Glad you enjoy the reading experience.

Bahamut• 13 years ago

I notice some usage of Knockout here - what is the Guardian's frontend dev team's thought about it?

jamesgorrie2• 13 years ago

We use it in some tools at the moment, but haven't found a user case to use it on the user facing site.

We're looking into Web Components and patterns there, as, personally, I think, they're the way forward.

Guardian Frontend – Source for the Guardian's responsive site

Related Stories