Sharing this on mobile-l.

-Adam

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org Date: Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 12:14 PM Subject: [Design] The page design of our dreams To: Wikimedia designers design@lists.wikimedia.org

Let's revisit the basic way that Mediawiki lays out media and content. It has worked well enough for twenty years, but perhaps we can do better.

In particular, I would like to be able to (a) make Wikimedia projects looks Really Beautiful (b) on a variety of different devices and formats.

Mobile and print are the forerunners here: in both cases we'd like more flexibility to lay out infoboxes, media, tables, and content in not-strictly-linear ways:

1) We'd like to be able to tag lead images, and use them more generally (backgrounds for page titles, previews, etc)

2) Infoboxes, references, footnotes, etc want to be untethered from their source location in the content and moved around -- for example, to sidebars or popups on mobile; to the footer or dedicated pages in print.

3) We would like to be able to crop and scale images better, but need focal point information or a box around critical regions of the image. (If the article is about the sun, and the photo is of a sunny day, cropping the sun out would be bad. Other images have critical features at the edges of the image we don't want to lose.) We currently have a single option "thumb", and a single user-specified scaling factor, meant for accessibility --- but an accessible size will differ on different devices, and the scaling factor doesn't apply to all images, only to those using "thumb".

4) We need more semantic information about images in order to make better layouts: in print, is this a "wide" image appropriate for spanning across multiple columns, or a "feature" image appropriate for having a page to itself? Is this a meaningful parallel grouping of images (ie, before and after) which shouldn't be broken up (but could be arranged either horizontally or vertically, or perhaps with a slider)? Should this image be laid out inline (rarely) or can it float to a more aesthetic location?

5) Even text content might be unmoored -- why can't we have pull quotes or sidebars in our articles?

6) What else? What other features of magazine, newpaper, or encyclopedia design are we missing?

From a technical perspective, I'd like to move eventually toward a

system with greater separation of layout and content (think of something like adobe pagemaker), where changes to layout can be made without editing the article text. But I'd also like to make sure that the technical issues don't overshadow the actual goal:

* What beautiful designs would you like for article content?

* What tools could we build to enable these designs?

Eventually we'd like to boil this down into a concrete design for a better image styling system, which seems like a reasonable first step in revamping what mediawiki can do for designers. That RFC is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90914 -- ideally the RFC will be guided by a concrete design for a specific article, say, http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Moon, so that the implementation of the RFC can focus on building the capabilities needed to execute that specific design. That way we're certain we're building something useful and beautiful for designers and readers, not just implementing something whose PHP code seems elegant. --scott

-- (http://cscott.net)

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