On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:46 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
Minor quibbles:
- The header hits a common problem - treating read/talk/edit/history
as four different interfaces to the same page, while they're really three interfaces to the page (read/edit/history) and one link to another page (talk) with its own three interfaces.
So there are six interfaces. You expose the four most important ones this way, you make talk:edit a button or something that's part of the talk page itself, and you ignore talk:history. That's for nerds. (I'm not sure if I've ever looked at a talk page history. It's pretty rare.)
In reality though, I think using tabs for actions is the wrong approach (and is after all what the old skin did). Buttons with standard glyphs, sparingly used, would work better. A big pencil button for "edit", a less prominent "discuss this" button for talk, with history squirrelled away somewhere. You don't need a view button - standard behaviour would be to have something like a clickable page title or a "<- Roman Empire" link on those other pages.
- The three-column system will look strangely constrained for pages
with very short (<<1 screen height) infoboxes or very few headings.
Mmmm...dunno about strange. Lots of blogs etc have wide margins.
- It's not clear what would happen to our usual mass of footer
navboxes, most of which assume full-width screens. Perhaps they could be migrated to the side columns?
Or they could remain full-width. That'd only be a problem if the article was short but had long right-hand-side infoboxes. You could deal with that by making the infobox column scrollable.
Major quibbles
- Languages have got lost entirely! (again...)
Minor detail. It'd be great to have some cues that show which of the interwiki links have significant amounts of content (especially any with more content than the one you're looking at).
Steve