Hi Simetrical,
Regarding your complaint about confusion of meaning - that a user will
confuse the meaning of the symbol. As I understand it, that's what the
universal edit button initiative is meant to solve.
There are already a large number of symbols which are understood by the
general populace, making one for "edit this" seems a worthy endeavor - as
the concept is appearing more and more often.
Off the top of my head, here are a few other symbols with known meaning:
* Left arrow: go back / reverse
* Right arrow: go forward / advance
* Circular arrow: refresh
* House: Home page
* Red X or white X against a solid red circle: Stop
* Speech bubble (as in a cartoon): Chat
* 3 1/4 Floppy disk: Save
* White curves on orange background: RSS/Atom feed
* Isosceles triangle facing rightwards: Play or GO
These are just a few I can see here on Gmail running in Firefox - I'm sure
there are myriad others. Unfortunately, one thing for which there isn't a
universal symbol yet is "edit this". Hopefully there will be soon, and we
won't have to have this debate :)
-- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw)
On 7/2/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/2/07, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hence my suggestion to include the full textual
message within the
"title"
attribute, which would appear as a tooltip.
Which will only appear if people actually hover over it, rather than
anytime they happen to glance in that direction.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, unless someone provides good evidence
that there's a concrete advantage to this, I'm going with my hunches
and not personally implementing icons, although if specific wikis
would like to they should be (and are) able to.
Editing MediaWiki namespace is only available to
admins: I'm asking for
a
solution which is available to anybody.
Users who want to change it for themselves can use CSS, yes
(.editsection a { color: transparent; background-image: ...; display:
block; width: ...; height: ...; overflow: hidden; } or variants
thereof), yes, and you don't need to resort to MySkin. (This happens
to be possible to do with CSS, but even if it weren't it would
certainly be easy with JavaScript, like virtually any other interface
change. It's not even really necessary to ask whether it's possible
to change the interface, the answer is virtually always yes if you're
using JavaScript.)
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