I like the overall look, couple notes:
- Think about tablet and mobile views -- galleries are even awfuller on
mobile right now than on desktop. This means a) consider touchscreens and b) consider small screens.
- I'm not sold on "show title on hover". Touchscreens don't do hover...
- Ragged edges can be fixed by adjusting spacing or aspect ratio a little,
like justifying text. This would look awesome. :)
- We need to fix what happens when clicking the items -- should get a nice
zoomed lightbox or something. This should be shared with non-gallery media however, so can be outside this present scope.
Another related thing to consider is Category page gallery displays... having a gallery-style display for contained media is relatively easy, but how can we show subcategories nicely? What about non-visual media? Can we display them better than we do now?
-- brion
So I've tweaked the demo a little bit in response to feedback: *If you're on a touchscreen, it will always show the caption instead of hover. Screen readers should also always see the caption, and if an image receives focus, its caption becomes visible. **Nonetheless, hover seems to be a sticking point, so I have a bunch of non-hover variations at http://tools.wmflabs.org/bawolff/gallery/index.php?title=Main_Page (May have to scroll) *Javascript now justifies the images. (The page is loaded with 1.5x the normal resolution images, and the <img> tag is manipulated to try and fill everything up, up to a maximum of 1.5x the original size. The last row is left as is, since its often a single image [Although as I write this, I think it should be manipulated too, might as well make it 1.5x]). As an aside, I found out that if I do text-align: justify, the browser will adjust the whitespace between images to justify it. However I think it looks better with the last row centred and typically adjusting the image size is enough; the whitespace doesn't have to be touched. **If you resize the browser window, js doesn't re-adjust stuff currently, so ragged edges re-appear. I suppose it could. Would make things a bit more complex
Another related thing to consider is Category page gallery displays... having a gallery-style display for contained media is relatively easy, but how can we show subcategories nicely?
There was a thread a while back on the commons village pump which I thought was an interesting idea, where some users wanted a magic word that would enable a gallery view for subcategories, where each subcategory has a representative image specified via some means (I imagine parser func on subcategory page), or if unspecified defaults to the first entry in the subcategory.
Thanks everyone for the feedback :D
--bawolff