I just love this Google I/O 2013 talk on human perception and
cognition, and its implications for interactive and visual design. It
is accessible, but with a lot of information and applies very well to
us I think.
I'm sure that many designers know all about this and some have
probably seen the clip before, but it is also very good for
developers, because many of these things we know subconsciously, but
it's not really part of our vocabulary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2exxj4COhU
DJ
Since we had the luxury of having several people in the office,
Trevor, Juliusz, Rob Moen, Ed Sanders, Shahyar, May, Monte and I sat
down to talk about the problem we currently have of having no standard
way to create icons. Here is my write up of this meeting, again, if
you attended please add/correct me on anything and if you were not
please ask for clarification where needed.
Currently we have two modes of creating icons in MediaWiki
1) Using a font
2) Using SVGs with PNG fallbacks
and the markup varies depending on what extension you look at.
We discussed both approaches and advantages and disadvantages of each.
One of the major disadvantages of the WikiFont is the additional HTTP
request it creates to download the font and cannot be embedded in the
stylesheet using data uris like SVGs can (due to URL size
restrictions).
One of the major advantages of WikiFont is you can design a grayscale
icon, and style it using font colour. Shahyar was happy to move Flow
to using SVG based fonts if we could build grayscale SVGs and change
their colours using ResourceLoader. One concrete example is when you
have an icon used in a constructive anchor. The icon needs to be
green, but when hovered over a lighter green.
Another advantage brought up by May was that currently she finds it
much easier to build icons in this way, and that having to maintain
separate coloured versions of the SVGs is a pain point to her.
We decided that we should push towards using SVGs that can be built
into fonts for the purpose of the app.
As next steps
1) Monte to explore using SVGs in the Wikipedia apps. He will create
font from SVGs. He will work with May to ensure her workflow is as
easy as before.
2) Trevor is going to look into how we can automatically generate
different colour versions of SVGs and automatically create PNGs from
them.
3) I am going to aim to agree on a standard icon HTML markup for
mediawiki ui. We still have an issue with the fact that everyone is
using different HTML markup to create icons. After reviewing all our
current approaches [1] it was clear that we were relatively closely
aligned and that it simply is a case of agreeing on class names.
We aim to get all the above done by Sept 15th, 2014 so please poke us
on the mailing list if you haven't had a follow up then.
Full disorganised notes can be found here [2].
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Icon_standardisation
[2] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Icon_standardisation
Something that came up yesterday when I was discussing with User:Rexx about the new WikiFont, is how it will influence accessibility, since it is actually a 'character' that will have effects on screenreader software. I have no idea what the effect will be, so if we start using that, I very much encourage that we should go and find out and then document some of the knowledge we gather into it's style and usage recommendations guidelines.
DJ
On bug 65317 [1] it is suggested that the preferences page should have
buttons aligned to the right and should be ordered so constructive is
the last. I've written a fix for this and I would appreciate some code
review.
This had me wondering, should this apply to all forms? e.g. the editing form
If so I think we probably need to get this into the style guide in
some form, detailing how buttons should be ordered. We may want to
introduce mw-ui-button-group or mw-ui-form-button-group.
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65317
"Wikipedia already looks great ... just add .m (on desktop)"
https://news.layervault.com/stories/31897-wikipedia-already-looks-great--ju…
For those unfamiliar, this is a designer's equivalent to Hacker News.
Interesting to see professional UX designers be less forgiving towards the
WikiWand design, in addition to the warm fuzzies from the love for the
mobile site.
This kind of feedback makes me wish you could set your desktop skin to use
mobile (aka Minerva). Or may e have clicking the "mobile view" link set a
cookie for my session to auto-redirect to mobile. Otherwise, it's hard to
evaluate how the mobile view stands up over sustained use on desktop.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
I was under the impression that a select element could be styled in
the same way as an input element using 'mw-ui-input' [1] as
essentially they are one field.
This came up when I tried to enable MediaWiki UI on select elements in
all forms.
If you are curious what this would look like it would look like this:
http://tools.wmflabs.org/styleguide/desktop/select.html
Is my impression true?
If yes, we should update the documentation to explicitly say that.
If no, we should update the documentation and describe how they should
be styled...
[1] http://tools.wmflabs.org/styleguide/desktop/section-1.html
I have seen several messages floating by regarding the mobile blockquote
styling, and its issue with the quote marks overlapping any floating
image. There is a simple solution; the minerva stylesheet just needs one
added (+) line:
@media all and (min-width: 768px) {
[...]
.content blockquote {
padding-right: 35px;
padding-left: 40px;
+ overflow: hidden;
}
}
I don't have a local repo, so I can't make a patch. So I'm throwing it
in here for others to patch and test it.
Regards,
--
Erwin Dokter