Sure. I completely understand and have written a patch for the preferences case, but I was just having a more bigger picture thought around this. Our job is to identify patterns and improve documentation in the style guide so developers are empowered to build the right thing based on advice from designers.

To take the editing form for example [1]
Currently we have Save | Show Preview |Show pages | cancel | editing help at the bottom of the form

My question is 
1) should all submit buttons be aligned right in forms
2) Where multiple buttons exist in a form, how do we order them. There is no guidance on how multiple buttons in a form should be rendered in the style guide. Is there some logical way to order buttons? Do constructive / destructive always come last? Does progressive come before those?

There are plenty of people, including a bunch of volunteers, keen to help with building out consistency across our projects, so we should work out what needs fixing should document any decisions on bugzilla [2].

Even if we don't know the right answer right now, it is good to start this discussion now.

[1] http://mwui.wmflabs.org/wiki/Foo?action=edit
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki&component=MediaWiki%20UI


On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 4:12 PM, Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Jon, what controls are you referring to, this should only affect 

[Save] Restore all default settings (in all sections)

and be right aligned to the page.

Restore default settings <- Quite destructive [ Save ] <- Normal constructive. 


I agree with Steven that we could just move forward with styling first and layout later.



Jared Zimmerman  \\  Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation               


On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
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

I think before we make a decision we need to think this through, by asking two questions:

1. What do most users expect here, in terms of ordering? If we don't know, how can we learn what they do expect?
2. If users expect the primary action to be on the right, how would this change core forms other than Preferences, such as signup, login, editing (in wikitext and VE)? 

In the mean time, the simplest thing to do is not to rewrite Preferences to make a new divergent standard, but just update the button classes without mucking with the ordering. That's the minimum viable release for updating Preferences to match mw.ui styles. This will provide the most benefit with the least effort. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager

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