On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:27 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Shivansh Shrivastava developed these mockups which he
presented at the
WikiConference India and shared with me at the Mumbai hackathon:
https://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/mockups/ajax-mockups/
* English Wikipedia main page mockup with newsticker and gallery
I'm not too fond of moving tickers like this; it's a bit distracting, but
it's also an accessibility issue: some people may have a hard time getting
at that text because it's moving around.
The gallery is more intriguing; we definitely need better support for
showing sets of nice pictures, and something in that direction would be
very nice in a number of places.
Again, automatically shifting through them can be an accessibility issue,
so shouldn't be generally relied upon but can be good for autoplay-style
stuff as long as you can pause it easily and navigate manually.
* Sliding login/account creation panel (based on existing GPL'd jQuery
plugin)
This looks super cool! Main practical problem with an ajax login form is
that we'd like to migrate all logins over to SSL (required, not optional)
somewhere in the medium-term.
If you're browsing on http: and then open up a login page, it not being on
SSL is a bit of a turn-off (even if it submits to SSL automatically, you
can't trust that -- a MiTM attack could change the form easily).
Of course if all readers were directed to SSL all the time this wouldn't be
an issue, but I believe ops says we're not ready for that yet. :)
* Floating table of contents tab
I don't like the particular implementation, but I like the basic idea: it's
a piece of UI that's important for navigating around a large article, and
it really ought not to be hidden up at the top where you can't get it once
you've gone somewhere.
-- brion