Hi,
This is a follow-up to Brandon's Wikimania talk about Winter.
Winter has an important concept of "the right rail". I like the "rail" part of the name, because it's a nice departure from "bar", but the "right" part is wrong for several reasons:
1. It's "left" in Arabic.
2. It can be misunderstood as "correct".
3. Most importantly, it doesn't say what is the rail for.
What is it for, really? Data, tools, info, navigation, aids, knowledge, gallery? I don't have a strongly preferred name myself. "Tools" is pretty close, but an infobox is not exactly a tool. Other suggestion are welcome.
I should also mention that we have a pretty similar bar (rail? column?) in the ContentTranslation extension. It shows information about words, translations, and tools to control the machine translation. In the Language team we usually call it the "tools column".
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
That space, currently called right rail, is for supplementary knowledge that accompany an article a user is interacting with. It could be education on how to edit, info from other sister projects, or even current hot conversations in Flow page, etc.
Apart from just article page, this can also be available for Flow boards, edit interfaces, or any other pages where supplementary information is relevant, needed, and helpful. I would call it supplementary information rail but that's long winded and generic.
mm
On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Hi,
This is a follow-up to Brandon's Wikimania talk about Winter.
Winter has an important concept of "the right rail". I like the "rail" part of the name, because it's a nice departure from "bar", but the "right" part is wrong for several reasons:
It's "left" in Arabic.
It can be misunderstood as "correct".
Most importantly, it doesn't say what is the rail for.
What is it for, really? Data, tools, info, navigation, aids, knowledge, gallery? I don't have a strongly preferred name myself. "Tools" is pretty close, but an infobox is not exactly a tool. Other suggestion are welcome.
I should also mention that we have a pretty similar bar (rail? column?) in the ContentTranslation extension. It shows information about words, translations, and tools to control the machine translation. In the Language team we usually call it the "tools column".
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
I think your right about the rail but let's not call it something so utilitarian as tools. Too boring. Also the content translation rail is based on the same concept that the design team arrived at a while back. So it's just a pattern we're all using.
Sent while mobile
On Aug 8, 2014, at 6:20 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
This is a follow-up to Brandon's Wikimania talk about Winter.
Winter has an important concept of "the right rail". I like the "rail" part of the name, because it's a nice departure from "bar", but the "right" part is wrong for several reasons:
It's "left" in Arabic.
It can be misunderstood as "correct".
Most importantly, it doesn't say what is the rail for.
What is it for, really? Data, tools, info, navigation, aids, knowledge, gallery? I don't have a strongly preferred name myself. "Tools" is pretty close, but an infobox is not exactly a tool. Other suggestion are welcome.
I should also mention that we have a pretty similar bar (rail? column?) in the ContentTranslation extension. It shows information about words, translations, and tools to control the machine translation. In the Language team we usually call it the "tools column".
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
Hi,
During the session, someone called it "the side rail".
Pros: It's directionality-agnostic, and can refer both to layout and "side content".
Con: It might be too similar to the existing "sidebar", especially after it passes through the localization process.
A similar possibility would be "the aside", with the same pros, not the con, and the added consistency with the HTML5 tag.
On Friday, August 8, 2014, Jared Zimmerman jzimmerman@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think your right about the rail but let's not call it something so utilitarian as tools. Too boring. Also the content translation rail is based on the same concept that the design team arrived at a while back. So it's just a pattern we're all using.
Sent while mobile
On Aug 8, 2014, at 6:20 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il');> wrote:
Hi,
This is a follow-up to Brandon's Wikimania talk about Winter.
Winter has an important concept of "the right rail". I like the "rail" part of the name, because it's a nice departure from "bar", but the "right" part is wrong for several reasons:
It's "left" in Arabic.
It can be misunderstood as "correct".
Most importantly, it doesn't say what is the rail for.
What is it for, really? Data, tools, info, navigation, aids, knowledge, gallery? I don't have a strongly preferred name myself. "Tools" is pretty close, but an infobox is not exactly a tool. Other suggestion are welcome.
I should also mention that we have a pretty similar bar (rail? column?) in the ContentTranslation extension. It shows information about words, translations, and tools to control the machine translation. In the Language team we usually call it the "tools column".
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','Design@lists.wikimedia.org'); https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Hi,
This is a follow-up to Brandon's Wikimania talk about Winter.
Winter has an important concept of "the right rail". I like the "rail" part of the name, because it's a nice departure from "bar", but the "right" part is wrong for several reasons:
- It's "left" in Arabic.
Can't it simply be known as "the left rail" in Arabic, then?
בתאריך 10 באוג 2014 23:01, "Ori Livneh" ori@wikimedia.org כתב:
On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Hi,
This is a follow-up to Brandon's Wikimania talk about Winter.
Winter has an important concept of "the right rail". I like the "rail"
part of the name, because it's a nice departure from "bar", but the "right" part is wrong for several reasons:
- It's "left" in Arabic.
Can't it simply be known as "the left rail" in Arabic, then?
No, because a lot of speakers of RTL languages will read emails, blog posts and village pump notifications about it in English and will try to understand how it applies to their projects. Let's try to prevent the confusion from the start.
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 10/08/14 20:06, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
בתאריך 10 באוג 2014 23:01, "Ori Livneh" <ori@wikimedia.org mailto:ori@wikimedia.org> כתב:
Can't it simply be known as "the left rail" in Arabic, then?
No, because a lot of speakers of RTL languages will read emails, blog posts and village pump notifications about it in English and will try to understand how it applies to their projects. Let's try to prevent the confusion from the start.
Do they not notice that the interface is flipped between LTR and RTL languages? Intuitively it seems like that would be the assumption, that right would simply become left.
That said, it does seem like a better solution would just be to refer to the thing by its function rather than position anyway, mind you. Functions are important, and if they're not important, well, that's a problem all by itself.
-I
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2014-08-11 20:56 GMT+03:00 Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com:
On 10/08/14 20:06, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
בתאריך 10 באוג 2014 23:01, "Ori Livneh" ori@wikimedia.org כתב:
Can't it simply be known as "the left rail" in Arabic, then?
No, because a lot of speakers of RTL languages will read emails, blog
posts
and village pump notifications about it in English and will try to understand how it applies to their projects. Let's try to prevent the confusion from the start.
Do they not notice that the interface is flipped between LTR and RTL languages? Intuitively it seems like that would be the assumption, that right would simply become left.
This requires considerable extra mental processing.
That said, it does seem like a better solution would just be to refer to
the
thing by its function rather than position anyway, mind you. Functions are important, and if they're not important, well, that's a problem all by itself.
Precisely. Function is by definition more meaningful that "left" and "right".
On 2014-08-11, at 3:07 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Precisely. Function is by definition more meaningful that "left" and "right".
It seems to me like the right rail as I've seen it so far contains *metadata*, as contrasted with the older (left-hand in LTR) "sidebar", which seems more focused on *navigation*. "Metadata rail" isn't perfect, but it seems close enough based on what I understand it to contain so far: languages, interproject links, infoboxes, subject navboxes … stuff that's mostly not article content directly, but much closer to article content than the boilerplate navigation we'd expect in the sidebar.
Nihiltres,
I like that thinking, we're thinking of one aspect of the *rail being "enrichment" and "explorations" but metadata is partly covered in that, in some cases things like automated galleries from commons or wiktionary definitions aren't strictly metadata (more enrichment) but metarail is beginning to differentiate the content from a normal navigation component.
Sent while mobile
On Aug 11, 2014, at 6:48 PM, Nihiltres nihiltres@ataraxic.net wrote:
On 2014-08-11, at 3:07 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Precisely. Function is by definition more meaningful that "left" and "right".
It seems to me like the right rail as I've seen it so far contains *metadata*, as contrasted with the older (left-hand in LTR) "sidebar", which seems more focused on *navigation*. "Metadata rail" isn't perfect, but it seems close enough based on what I understand it to contain so far: languages, interproject links, infoboxes, subject navboxes … stuff that's mostly not article content directly, but much closer to article content than the boilerplate navigation we'd expect in the sidebar. _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Aug 15, 2014, at 7:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman jzimmerman@wikimedia.org wrote:
metarail
"Metarail" sounds like the name of a 1990s era action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and maybe someone from Full House.
--- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
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