tarquin wrote:
Here's my rough version of a new layout.
It's not too radical a departure from what we have, but I think it is
much clearer, particularly for newcomers.
Is it possible someone could upload those two test page files somewhere
on the server so people can easily see the test page & comment?
http://test.wikipedia.org/Paddington%20-%20pass%202.html
I would sugest that the current default skin be kept
as an option, but
that this become the new default skin.
It's fairly pleasant. :)
A few thoughts...
* The width of the sidebar is fixed in pixels, so it doesn't scale for
people with larger than normal text. Personally, my default font
settings on Mozilla at home are just a tad larger than conventional, and
most of the lines break (as they do on the current default skin).
Screenshot:
http://leuksman.com/misc/paddington.png
Consider using a font-based em width for this. (Hmm, are min-width and
max-width usefully supported?)
* There needs to be a little space before the language links; it all
runs together visually for me.
* Is it really necessary to say "Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia"
_three times_ in the first column-inch? :)
* Another problem that's common with the current skin: if your window is
modestly sized in the horizontal way, the things in the topbar get
rather ugly:
http://leuksman.com/misc/paddington-crunch.png
The 'go' and 'search' buttons should be locked together so they line
break as a unit if necessary. <nobr> isn't standard, but I think you can
use the whitespace CSS property to disable line breaking...?
* It's been occasionally requested that we clean up the top of the page
so Google etc. will actually show useful extracts in search results.
Just something to think about...
* There's still a lot of stuff in the top links, particularly when a lot
of language links are present. (Magnus's experimental ErikCategories
code puts category links at the top, too.) While convenient for those of
us with a good scroll wheel, this poses accessibility problems: imagine
you're blind, and have to listen to fifty generic-sounding links *every
time* you visit a Wikipedia page. Some voice-based browsers may have a
feature to skip to headings, but if we move two dozen links between the
first header and the body text, we defeat that. It may be useful to have
a (hidden?) "skip navigation" link that takes us to an anchor at the
actual article body.
(Incidentally, we can probably trash the "internal" class for links, and
just treat the rarer "external" links with a special class. That'll save
on bandwidth. ;)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)
