[seqfan] OEIS Frontend Redesign

[Alexander Craggs]

Hey,

I'm a big fan of the OEIS website (having used it for just over a decade now), especially its ability to understand sequences covering a surprisingly wide range of topics.  My friend and I stumbled across the 'Suggestions for OEIS from OEIS 50 Workshop <http://oeis.org/wiki/Suggestions_for_OEIS_from_OEIS_50_Workshop#General_remarks_about_making_changes_to_the_OEIS>' page on the Wiki and saw a 2014 post about updating the site to HTML5 and improving mobile accessibility.  The accessibility and user experience improvements suggested don't seem to have come to light, the design having not significantly changed since 2012 [1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101129053330/http://oeis.org/> [2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20130309111854/http://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C2%2C3%2C6%2C11%2C23%2C47%2C106%2C235&language=english&go=Search>.

We wanted to try to change this, so we took a couple of days off work in order to redesign it.  We focused on the following:

- Improving entry-level use.  Instead of requiring searchers to know about 'keyword:' and 'author:' tags we now include buttons to help out, whilst still allowing the full complexity for advanced users.
- Mobile-responsive design, ensuring text is legible and buttons clickable on all screen sizes.
- Keeping the site fast and small.  Caching allows us to save 88% of data over 100 sequence searches (3MB new vs 25MB original).  We're also faster on first load, the query '1, 2, 5' being 33% smaller (600KB new vs 900KB original).  The page load delays are primarily caused by the OEIS server responding slowly, which aren't easily fixed by us.

The initial version is live here:

    https://intdb.io

It's an open source project, so you can also see the source code here on GitHub, <https://github.com/popey456963/intdb> we accept contributions from anyone!  We've done this in a 'hackathon' format over two days, so there are numerous bugs listed here <https://github.com/popey456963/intdb/issues>.

We know it's missing a large number of key features like accessibility, i18n and various links (especially my favourite 'listen' feature), but wanted to put it out there to see what people thought and whether there were any suggestions on ways we could improve things.

Regards,
Alexander & Tom.

P.S. This is the first time posting to a mailing list, and I've really struggled.  Hopefully this email goes through, unlike the last couple of attempts!