On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:46 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
Minor quibbles:
* The header hits a common problem - treating read/talk/edit/history
as four different interfaces to the same page, while they're really
three interfaces to the page (read/edit/history) and one link to
another page (talk) with its own three interfaces.
So there are six interfaces. You expose the four most important ones
this way, you make talk:edit a button or something that's part of the
talk page itself, and you ignore talk:history. That's for nerds. (I'm
not sure if I've ever looked at a talk page history. It's pretty
rare.)
In reality though, I think using tabs for actions is the wrong
approach (and is after all what the old skin did). Buttons with
standard glyphs, sparingly used, would work better. A big pencil
button for "edit", a less prominent "discuss this" button for talk,
with history squirrelled away somewhere. You don't need a view button
- standard behaviour would be to have something like a clickable page
title or a "<- Roman Empire" link on those other pages.
* The three-column system will look strangely
constrained for pages
with very short (<<1 screen height) infoboxes or very few headings.
Mmmm...dunno about strange. Lots of blogs etc have wide margins.
* It's not clear what would happen to our usual
mass of footer
navboxes, most of which assume full-width screens. Perhaps they could
be migrated to the side columns?
Or they could remain full-width. That'd only be a problem if the
article was short but had long right-hand-side infoboxes. You could
deal with that by making the infobox column scrollable.
Major quibbles
* Languages have got lost entirely! (again...)
Minor detail. It'd be great to have some cues that show which of the
interwiki links have significant amounts of content (especially any
with more content than the one you're looking at).
Steve