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Comment by angrymachine | Hacker News Reader

(Author here) I personally don't think the visual style of the Django admin is ugly. I'd agree that it looks dated, and also agree that it could use a few minor color and accessibility improvements.

My perspective is that we have a new generation of Django devs among us, who grew up using fancy JS frameworks, SaaS dashboards, A.I.-assisted code tools, etc. So for a newcomer seeing the Django admin for the first time, it's a bit different.

My goal of the article was to capture the tribal knowledge that seems to have not gotten passed down to this new generation.

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I don't see any tribal knowledge being passed on here. It seems django's admin panel is ugly because nobody has interest, enough, in investing to make it beautiful. And you were looking for a fancy answer with wisdom as "it's to discourage its use for consumer blabla" while the obvious answer is the right one. It's ugly and there isn't enough interest to change it, because it works well enough to cover the intended usecases. The other usecases would need more investment, and nobody invested.

I think there's also the aspect that it wasn't built with ever being restyled in mind. It looks fiddly to make changes to (even if it actually might not be), so people don't feel inclined to dig in.

It’s also really hard to change look and feel in a mature product. You have to have a good vision and then fight against a horde of people who have their own ideas, resist change, or will bike shed you into submission. And you need to have good taste and design principles to begin with; it has to be a real upgrade. And it has to be worth it.

You don’t just submit a pull request called “Redesign”. The with is more political and organizational in nature

I see three quotes from past contributors in the article, that seems like valuable knowledge to me? Anecdotally as someone who contributes to the Django admin I see the interest is there. I’d say it being clunky is for other reasons (for example there being more back-end developers contributing to the project than other skillsets).

> “why is the Django admin so ‘ugly’?”.

Not sure if English is your native language, but quotation marks usually land on the outside of any other punctuation. (Yes, it does look goofy.)

Now, the quote above is kind of special because you have a portion of it quoted within a statement. However, if you are paraphrasing all but the "ugly" part. In that case, I would drop the outer quotations marks.

> why is the Django admin so "ugly?"

Bring on the downvotes.

A few quotes from the top results on DuckDuckGo for "quotation marks and punctuation":

Question marks are a little different. If the question mark is part of the quote, place it inside the quotation marks. If the question mark is not part of the quote, and instead the quote is part of a question, place it outside of the quotation marks. This rule also applies to exclamation points.

- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/

Place a question mark or exclamation point within closing quotation marks if the punctuation applies to the quotation itself. Place the punctuation outside the closing quotation marks if the punctuation applies to the whole sentence.

- https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/punctuation/quota...

Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks. North American printing usually puts full stops and commas (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not.[14][15] Styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark

Based on my internet experience (...) and among this particular HN audience, I'd say you're fighting an uphill battle given our collective preference for where to place and how to treat quotes.

IIRC this is mostly a US/UK distinction (maybe even US/rest of world). I tend towards putting the punctuation outside the quote, especially if the original quote didn't have that punctuation.

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