rfc: FAST Website Updates for vCurrent

[KingOfTac]

💬 RFC

This is a summary of proposed updates to the FAST homepage that could be incorporated right now. The RFC is to get feedback and suggestions from the team and members of the community.

🔦 Context

• There has been some confusion regarding FAST in relation to js frameworks (Is something like React required to use FAST?).
• There are also some parts of the homepage that could use some visual polish and UX improvements.
• To my knowledge, the FAST Frame section was technically deprecated when fast-components was archived as FAST no longer has its own implementation of the components.

💻 Planned Changes

• Replace FAST Frame with a live code example that highlights a basic example of using FAST.
• Update the integrations section with clearer wording on FAST's relationship with js frameworks
• Make cards clickable across their entire surface
• Update card transition styles to be more performant (currently using transition: all)
• The community link in the header just points to the discord. This could probably be moved to the right with the github link and updated to "discord" and the appropriate icon.

[EisenbergEffect]

@KingOfTac Thanks for your patience in waiting for me to respond to this. Everything you've listed out here makes clear sense to me. If you want to jump in on this, I'd support getting this work in as soon as you have availability. The best thing is probably to create a branch, make all the updates, and then just send the PR referencing this issue. I can assign the issue to you for clarity. Just let me know when you are ready to start. Once we have the PR we can easily do some back and forth feedback on any polish/alterations that folks think need to be done. I think the best thing is to probably just do it using your best judgement on the details to help move things forward.

[KingOfTac]

@EisenbergEffect How do you feel about also adding a stackblitz starter? https://developer.stackblitz.com/docs/platform/project-starters/

[EisenbergEffect]

Yes please. If you want to do that it would be cool to have a v1 and a v2 starter. We can return the v1 starter after we get v2 released.

[KingOfTac]

Looking at the docs we could do something like fast.design/v1/new and fast.design/v2/new where each url would directly open a fork of their respective starter

[KingOfTac]

Small update on progress here. Life got in the way like it tends to do and I wasn't able to get started on this as soon as I would have liked.

With that being said, work on the homepage updates is underway. I'm currently working on replacing the fast frame tool with an embedded stackblitz example and adding stackblitz starters for v1 and v2 of fast-element.

I had initially started working on the animation performance for the card hover styles, but there is something else going on that is really hampering the smoothness of the transitions. I suspect it could be the canvas animation in the background that is causing the drag on performance, but I decided to move on to other things for the time being and come back to the transitions later.

@EisenbergEffect how do you feel about also updating the website to use the latest versions of the packages? My justification here is that I think the website could take advantage of some of the fixes and perf improvements in the new versions. One thing to note is that we lose out on being able to use fast-components but I don't think we'll miss out on much as the site uses quite a bit of custom styles for the components, and only uses a handful of the components from the package.

[KingOfTac]

I have most of these changes in place minus the stackblitz examples and the css transition performance improvements. Currently working on the stackblitz portion.

@Falkicon I'd like to get your thoughts on this: With regards to the transition performance issues, I have confirmed that it is not the background-design element that is slowing down page performance like I previously theorized and I have yet to determine why the hover transition performance for the cards is poor. I have even tested on monitors of varying refresh rates to see if it was a hardware thing. With that being said I think something like this would require a more in-depth redesign of the cards which from what I understand you are looking into new designs for the site as a whole. I can still dig in and try to find out the cause and fix it, or it can wait for a redesign if it is all going to change anyway.

[janechu]

This is currently in progress, we are in the midst of a complete overhaul of the site and the documentation and have taken feedback from these issues as part of our work. Closing this for now, but please feel free to re-file after v2 of @microsoft/fast-element launch if you see gaps!