Hi,
What are the pros and cons on the choice of menu placement? Why at left?
For example, I would prefer the mediawiki menu to be placed at the right side of the screen. Is anyone else who likes that placement?
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 03:14:06 +0300, NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org wrote:
Hi,
What are the pros and cons on the choice of menu placement? Why at left?
For example, I would prefer the mediawiki menu to be placed at the right side of the screen. Is anyone else who likes that placement?
For whatever reason, the left side of the screen is more natural to right-handed people. As a BeOS user, it would make more sense on the right side - thats where our Deskbar is, but I've seen a lot of screenshots were people have moved it to the left. It just seems that people are wired that way..
Cian
-- NSK Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On Friday 29 October 2004 03:13, Cian Duffy wrote:
right-handed people. As a BeOS user, it would make more sense on the
Can you remind me the name of the company that developed BeOS?
screenshots were people have moved it to the left. It just seems that people are wired that way..
People who browse at low resolutions will have difficulty reading the content if the menu is on the left. A menu on the right will enable these persons to enjoy the content without horizontal scrolling. Menus on the left are also awful when printing. These were the reasons why I placed the menu of Wikinerds Portal on the right side.
BTW how is printing handled in MonoBook?
On Oct 28, 2004, at 5:25 PM, NSK wrote:
On Friday 29 October 2004 03:13, Cian Duffy wrote:
right-handed people. As a BeOS user, it would make more sense on the
Can you remind me the name of the company that developed BeOS?
Be.
People who browse at low resolutions will have difficulty reading the content if the menu is on the left. A menu on the right will enable these persons to enjoy the content without horizontal scrolling.
The sidebar takes up equal amounts of space whichever side it's on, so scrolling is necessary or not depending on the size of the content. A sidebar on the right makes horizontal scrolling much more difficult when it happens, however, as the menu and content may end up overlapping; IIRC we changed the default sidebar position from right to left in mid-2002 for this reason. (The default is right-side for languages using right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.)
In the MonoBook skin it's currently fixed to the default; no one's gotten around to coding up the option to make it user-selectable in MonoBook.
Menus on the left are also awful when printing.
The sidebar doesn't appear when printing, so I assume you haven't tried it.
BTW how is printing handled in MonoBook?
There is a generic print stylesheet attached via a <link> element in the HTML output. I would highly recommend you take a look at the HTML and CSS output to see what's going on; if you have specific questions about how something works or why something is done in a certain way, feel free ask in reference to the particular code.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Friday 29 October 2004 03:59, Brion Vibber wrote:
There is a generic print stylesheet attached via a <link> element in
But that's not WYSIWYG: User sees a page with a menu and the printer outputs a page without a menu.
feel free ask in reference to the particular code.
Thanks, I will.
But that's not WYSIWYG: User sees a page with a menu and the printer outputs a page without a menu.
Why would you want to print the menu? Wouldn't you want to print just the page content? When you print a Word document you don't expect to see Word's chrome included in the printout.
On Friday 29 October 2004 06:12, Michael wrote:
Why would you want to print the menu?
Presenting the MediaWiki/Wikipedia to someone when a laptop is not available.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org writes:
On Friday 29 October 2004 06:12, Michael wrote:
Why would you want to print the menu?
Presenting the MediaWiki/Wikipedia to someone when a laptop is not available.
Seems like the obvious solution there is either 1) a public library or 2) printed screen shots.
Presenting the MediaWiki/Wikipedia to someone when a laptop is not available.
Why would they care what the menus look like? Menus are just menus - it's content that is worth looking at. Despite what so many websites seem to think (Flash menus and the like!).
On Friday 29 October 2004 09:00, Michael wrote:
Why would they care what the menus look like?
Some menus are sexy.
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 12:23:56 +0300, NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org wrote:
On Friday 29 October 2004 09:00, Michael wrote:
Why would they care what the menus look like?
Some menus are sexy.
In which case, as suggested, you can demonstrate them with a screenshot. You wouldn't expect a sexy Mozilla skin to also show up on your printout; nor, as somebody's mentioned, would the menus on your word-processor show up on your letters and reports, however "sexy" they might be.
That said, the automagic printable version does seem to be incredibly non-intuitive to people. Unfortunately, I can't think of a convenient way of saying "contrary to what you might think, this page will look OK printed" other than implying the exact opposite (with a "printable version" link or somesuch). I believe last time this was mentioned, there were suggestions of having a javascript "Print" or "Print preview" link somewhere, which might give the right impression, but no decent implementation was found (especially the latter seems to have no easy solution). Anybody fancy trying to take this idea any further?
On Friday 29 October 2004 14:50, Rowan Collins wrote:
no easy solution). Anybody fancy trying to take this idea any further?
I wonder whether all browsers can support the <link> attribute that MediaWiki uses for linking to the printing skin.
Will it work on links?
That said, the automagic printable version does seem to be incredibly non-intuitive to people. Unfortunately, I can't think of a convenient way of saying "contrary to what you might think, this page will look OK printed" other than implying the exact opposite (with a "printable version" link or somesuch). I believe last time this was mentioned, there were suggestions of having a javascript "Print" or "Print preview" link somewhere, which might give the right impression, but no decent implementation was found (especially the latter seems to have no easy solution). Anybody fancy trying to take this idea any further?
I like to put a 'Printable Version' link on pages even if they actually will print exactly as the normal pages. Usually I use the same URL for the current page and just add ?print to the end. The only difference usually is that I use a little Javascript to pop up a print dialog box automaticlly for the print version. Sometimes I do make minor template changes for the printable versions too. If I think I want to change things that might be harder to do with just CSS.
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 19:22:11 -0700, Michael mogmios@mlug.missouri.edu wrote:
I like to put a 'Printable Version' link on pages even if they actually will print exactly as the normal pages. Usually I use the same URL for the current page and just add ?print to the end. The only difference usually is that I use a little Javascript to pop up a print dialog box automaticlly for the print version. Sometimes I do make minor template changes for the printable versions too. If I think I want to change things that might be harder to do with just CSS.
index.php?title=foo&action=print ? (plus rewrite rules) It would seem like a relatively easy hack.
-- Jamie ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/ Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 12:05:27 -0400, Jamie Bliss astronouth7303@gmail.com wrote:
index.php?title=foo&action=print ? (plus rewrite rules) It would seem like a relatively easy hack.
This used to exist, but when the default skin was changed to one using XHTML + CSS, it was moved to CSS instead as representing a "nicer" way of doing it. So although we *could* reimplement such a link, it would a) not actually do anything, and b) imply, wrongly, that printing without clicking it would lead to an ugly printout (so that people will never realise there's an easier way to achieve an identical result).
I repeat my suggestion that if we can find a "good enough" way of popping up a print preview (or, as a last resort, a "Print..." dialog) from a JavaScript link, we could have a "Print this page" button that did so without doing any additional loading. That may be a big "if", though, I admit.
Otherwise, we need to find a way of switching the active display stylesheet with the minimum of server load - perhaps playing with *that* in JS? (What am I saying? I normally hate JS! But then, we're talking CSS anyway, so it's not like it's a client-side/server-side issue).
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com writes:
That said, the automagic printable version does seem to be incredibly non-intuitive to people.
Only because of poor web design by most people, even well known sites.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a convenient way of saying "contrary to what you might think, this page will look OK printed" other than implying the exact opposite (with a "printable version" link or somesuch).
That's not a bad idea.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org writes:
On Friday 29 October 2004 03:59, Brion Vibber wrote:
There is a generic print stylesheet attached via a <link> element in
But that's not WYSIWYG: User sees a page with a menu and the printer outputs a page without a menu.
Why is that a problem? It degrades nicely to a printable version without all the added fuss of having to go to another page to get a printable version.
On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:53:26 -0700, Paul Johnson baloo@ursine.dyndns.org wrote:
But that's not WYSIWYG: User sees a page with a menu and the printer outputs a page without a menu.
Why is that a problem? It degrades nicely to a printable version without all the added fuss of having to go to another page to get a printable version.
Yeah, but when one doesn't know or expect that (and is, perhaps, in a situation where they don't care to spare paper in testing, such as a public computer lab with pay printouts) they won't *try* to print from the mediawiki site. They'll spend extra time copying articles to notepad or a wordprocessor to print from there, or, if they've been around longer, will do what I did before I knew the site was printable and switch back to classic skin so they can have printable links back.
[Yes, there is "print preview". But that also is unexpected behavior.]
*Muke!
I feel like this conversation is futile and that it is only being perpetuated for the point of an argument.
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 08:01:58 -0600, Muke Tever muke@frath.net wrote:
Yeah, but when one doesn't know or expect that (and is, perhaps, in a situation where they don't care to spare paper in testing, such as a public computer lab with pay printouts) they won't *try* to print from the mediawiki site. They'll spend extra time copying articles to notepad or a wordprocessor to print from there, or, if they've been around longer, will do what I did before I knew the site was printable and switch back to classic skin so they can have printable links back.
The fact is that other than a few specific instantces (where the person probably has a vague idea what he/she is doing anyway), when a page is printed only the article content is needed.
[Yes, there is "print preview". But that also is unexpected behavior.]
This is browser dependent no wiki has control over this. A good browser, however, should render using the print.css style sheet.
-- Jamie ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/ Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!
One thing I noticed is that no browser I've tried supports alternative stylesheet selection for print media. I was somewhat disappointed in Mozilla in this regard. It'd be nice if there were multiple stylesheets available that the browser would let you choose which you wanted to print with.
Yeah, but when one doesn't know or expect that (and is, perhaps, in a situation where they don't care to spare paper in testing, such as a public computer lab with pay printouts) they won't *try* to print from the mediawiki site. They'll spend extra time copying articles to notepad or a wordprocessor to print from there, or, if they've been around longer, will do what I did before I knew the site was printable and switch back to classic skin so they can have printable links back.
[Yes, there is "print preview". But that also is unexpected behavior.]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org writes:
On Friday 29 October 2004 03:13, Cian Duffy wrote:
right-handed people. As a BeOS user, it would make more sense on the
Can you remind me the name of the company that developed BeOS?
Be developed BeOS. Be got purched by Palm, which then merged with Handspring and became PalmOne.
screenshots were people have moved it to the left. It just seems that people are wired that way..
People who browse at low resolutions will have difficulty reading the content if the menu is on the left. A menu on the right will enable these persons to enjoy the content without horizontal scrolling. Menus on the left are also awful when printing. These were the reasons why I placed the menu of Wikinerds Portal on the right side.
BTW how is printing handled in MonoBook?
Well, as I understand it, at least with monobook, the CSS is written in such a way that allows things to degrade nicely when sent to the printer. Not WYSIWYG, more like having a "printer-friendly" version embedded in the same page as the browser-optimal version.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Please read http://ursine.dyndns.org/wiki/index.php/Top_Posting
Cian Duffy myob87@gmail.com writes:
For whatever reason, the left side of the screen is more natural to right-handed people.
I'm not sure it has anything to do with which hand is dominant, but rather which direction your language is read from. English is run - From left to right, from the top going down. I hypothesize that the top and left sides tend to be good, handy places for English (and any other top-down, left-to-right language) speakers.
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org