Daniel Mayer wrote: Personally, I find the current English main page to be overly dense; my eyes glaze over when I look at it, and I've been here for a year and a half. I shudder to think of a newbie's reaction. (Hmm, should we conduct usability testing? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.) The color backgrounds on the selected events and community sections in the /Temp page are an improvement, setting off separate sections, but it's still a bit of a jumble of links that are hard to tell apart. For whatever reason, I find the French front page a little clearer. It's not necessarily the backgrounds or the colors; but a few things that look nice to me: * Skips the sea of links of our "selected articles" section. While it's certainly useful, it's very hard on the eyes. Several solid lines of undifferentiated blue text, carefully set up to avoid being broken by any ragged nasty white space... right at the top, too, so it's the first thing a new user tries to read. Ouch! * A few more important links (for instance, [[Le Bistro]]) are given in bold, so the sea of links isn't so flat. * The header size isn't as distractingly large * Border and internal padding on the 'community' cell * the tilde (~) as a spacer instead of (-) gives a little more space between links in the category sections. This may help. Anyway, just thoughts. IANAGD. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 01:21:05 -0700, Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> gave utterance to the following: Why do the section headings "Encyclopedia" and "Community" have a line height smaller than their font size? Text is really rather difficult to read when all the descenders are truncated. -- Richard Grevers I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere!

Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Daniel Ehrenberg wrote: Madness ? spurious ? means nothing ? what does "purty" means ? I don't think it is nice either Well, some people designed this. And I think enough people like it and inspired themselves from it for these comments to be quite rude. Colors have meaning to us. We collectively find them pretty and meaningful, more joyful than the restrained english design. More appealing. And areas more defined. I think I remember that when I advertised our new design about 6 months ago, you gave a positive appreciation of it. Good then, bad now ? :-) Good for the french, bad for the english ? :-) I don't get it. who and when ? And why is "conservative" the best choice ? I don't like it. I disagree. This is quite common for websites to change their design from time to time. Google does give life to his homepage as well. People are no stupid. They may recognise the difference between a change of design and a change of content Why is yellow associated with community ? why not pink ? why not green ? why not blue ? Well, perhaps we should do what Oliezekat suggested after all. He suggested that the main page be with css, and that any user could change the colors of the main page in his pref page to suit his needs. And make something like MyWikip�dia --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!

Anthère wrote in very small part: | >what does "purty" means ? | | Toby wrote: It's a humorous or derogatory spelling of "pretty", | which implies that the speaker is unsophisticated. | Mispronouncing "pretty" as "purty" /'p@rti/ (see [[SAMPA Chart]]) | is similar to mispronouncing "nuclear" as "nucular" /'nuwkj@l@r/. | Such pronunciation has even become standard in the case of "iron", | which is pronounced "iurn" /'aj@rn/ even by educated speakers. Toby is once again, dead wrong. The proper incorrect spelling for "pretty" is "purdy" -- with a "D"... I'm compiling my sources now... -S

Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> wrote: Stevertigo wrote: This spelling indicates use of a voiced alveoloar flap (IPA [r-with-no-line-above-the-curve]) instead of an unvoiced alveolar stop (IPA [t]). Since mav well may use this flap himself (saying "priddy"), perhaps he left it out of his mispronunciation spelling, lest he be accused of hypocrisy. Say ... /you/ don't use that flap, do you SV? (Test: Do you pronounce "latter" and "ladder" the same?) You're not being hypocritical here, are you? ^_^ Similarly, anybody that makes fun of G.W. Bush by spelling his pronunciation of "nuclear" as "noocular", yet themself pronounces the word as "nooclear", is being hypocritical (that's why I wrote "nucular"). "nookyuhlar" is primarily unjustified exaggeration. And don't get me started on "wuz"! (Brits, of course, have more freedom to make fun of Americans using some of these spellings.) -- Toby LOL. Thanks to both of you anyway :-) We should have sounds in wiktionary... to be NPOV, each word would have to respect each pronunciation :-) And...I pronounce nuclear, newclear :-((( --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!

| This spelling indicates use of a voiced alveoloar flap | (IPA [r-with-no-line-above-the-curve]) | instead of an unvoiced alveolar stop (IPA [t]). | Since mav well may use this flap himself (saying "priddy"), | perhaps he left it out of his mispronunciation spelling, | lest he be accused of hypocrisy. | | Say ... /you/ don't use that flap, do you SV? | (Test: Do you pronounce "latter" and "ladder" the same?) | You're not being hypocritical here, are you? ^_^ | Sheesh. You win. :)- Steevin

--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> wrote: There already is a morphophonic system for English that is used in most (or atleast several) dictionaries (I know atleast Webster). The only problem is that it uses strange accent marks and does very poorly with non-leading r's. Word/phrases like "going to" don't fair well either. I don't really see how any morphophonic system can deal with the wide range between /g@n@/ and /goIN tu/, and in some cases, we will need to write multiple pronunciations anyway. Where I live, there are two towns, Chili and Charlotte, which are pronounced completely differently than a normal New York state accent would prescribe. We pronounce them /tSailai/ and /Sar\l'at/ respectively, whereas people from elsewhere pronounce it /tSIli/ and /'Sar\lIt/. There is no regular pattern for this. I tried to develope a morphophonic system while at camp but encountered these problems (but it can do what the current system can do without accent marks). In any event, it would be very confusing for readers to have a pronounciation system unique to wikipedia that they'd have to learn. -LittleDan __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com