By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
- d.
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses?
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses?
Probably yes, but not in a box but in a separate article. I think I saw one once, a separate article on stats for a country, but I can't remember where I saw that. When some infoboxes are longer than a small article, you know something has bloated somewhere.
I looked at United States:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
And the number of sub-articles is mind-numbingly large. Many of those have sub-infoboxes, so maybe too much is being put in the main country infoboxes?
Here we go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
The weather articles are similarly stats- and table-heavy.
I'm sure they are useful, but do people really use them?
Carcharoth
2009/3/3 Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk:
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
Indeed. I emailed Hakon Lie inviting his participation, but noting that dropping even IE6, lovely as that would be, is not a happener in the foreseeable future. We can't presume a world with non-broken graphical browsers. So any CSSing would be required to allow for this, and degrade well in pure text form.
It's a goal well worth trying for. The question is how to get there and if we really can make the markup actually smaller and less confusing.
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses?
Why not? It's incredibly templatable and it's probably of use to *someone*.
- d.
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses?
Why not? It's incredibly templatable and it's probably of use to *someone*.
Yeah, but the more information we put in the infoboxes, the harder it becomes to find the most frequently requested bits - area, population, etc. I'm all for us being helpful to the people who want to know abtruse demographic data, but if we can do it without the schoolkids looking for "population" getting overwhelmed, so much the better!
Perhaps this would be an excellent use for the show/hide buttons we're getting on a lot of templates -the "demographics" section giving you a population figure and an option to show another forty sets of statistics, for example.
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses?
--
- Andrew Gray
All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator of economic & political development; and water-proportion affects recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much ground for complaining.
* Although one certainly hopes that anyone driving in a particular country will not need Wikipedia to tell them something like this!
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of our audience would not be happy...
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses?
All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator of economic & political development; and water-proportion affects recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much ground for complaining.
I think the point is that some people find them distracting, so the information could be organised better. A good infobox acts as a summary for the most-needed and salient information. Other data should, technically, be relegated to other infoboxes on subarticles, while still retaining some way of presenting all the data in one place for those who want that as well.
It's not easy to work out what the balance should be, nor to organise the mass of available data on a country. When wanting examples of bloated infoboxes, I tend to look at chemical elements and planets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Though actually, the thing that annoys me most about infoboxes is that if there is one bit of data I'm looking for, it invariably isn't there. I then Google it (though I should really find the time to add it to the Wikipedia article).
Here is a test. Imagine you are looking for a rough value for the diameter of the Earth. Try finding it quickly in our article on the Earth. How long does it take you to find the value you want, and what distracts you along the way? Did you find what you wanted in the infobox or in the text of the article?
Do the same to find a rough value for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon distances.
Is this information easy to find? Is it presented in an accessible way?
Try using out Earth article to find out that a rough value for the Earth-Sun distance is. It's roughly 150 million km as any bright schoolchild will tell you, but in our Wikipedia article, that is buried deep in the article and in the infobox it is presented as three orbital characteristics (aphelion, perihelion, semi-major axis).
Maybe the answer is that Wikipedia doesn't do "rough" answers, but I know other websites that present such data in more accessible ways. Try finding, on Wikipedia, a table showing the distances of the planets from the Sun. It seems to be here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_in_hydrostatic_equ...
Incidentally, the Earth-Moon distance is in the first sentence of Moon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
And wonders of wonders, it includes "about thirty times the diameter of the Earth" - which makes the data accessible and informative. :-)
[Both "Moon" and "Earth" are featured articles, btw.]
Carcharoth
Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for "proportion of area which is water", the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it uses? --
- Andrew Gray
All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator of economic & political development; and water-proportion affects recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much ground for complaining.
- Although one certainly hopes that anyone driving in a particular
country will not need Wikipedia to tell them something like this!
It is easy to argue that any specific factoid is significant about the subject, and that it should thus be included in an infobox, but the present issue is a broader one about how many factoids can an infobox contain without degradation of its usefulness. The primary infobox for a subject needs to be limited to the most important information which the average reader is most likely to seek, and which he can find in a predictable place. I don't have much basis to make a specific recommendation about how many factoids a primary box should contain, but a good rule of thumb might be: If you need to scroll to see it all, it's probably too long.
That said, nothing in this prevents separate secondary infoboxes. If it is agreed that per capita GNP for a country belongs in its primary infobox, nothing prevents having a secondary box containing a broader selection of economic indicators.
Ec
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:30 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
- d.
Infoboxes are tubular data (in most cases) so they can and commonly should be displayed in tables.
The author has only taken in account standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera to name a few) which is wrong since they are not 100% used, i believe IE 6 which is hardly compliant in these matters is still at 40% usage, thats just the people visually accessing (eg: monitor and web browser), we also have to take into account people using screen readers and other such methods for accessing the internet.
Lets look at some of his "Suggested principles": * style attributes are not allowed Style attributes are the basis for all CSS (eg: height, width, float, color just to name a few) formatting whether you do it using inline css or from a separate file.
* table markup are only used for real tables, not for layout purposes These are real tables, Tables are for anything being shown in a tabular format which they are and even his (or her) example shows this
* all div and span elements have a class attribute with a meaningful value They currently do, the infoboxes that have classes being used are generally using them to attach/identify the appropriate metadata
* semantic elements (e.g., dl, dt, dt, ol, li are preferred over div and span, when appropriate A div is a "container", those semantic elements he has listed are forms of lists http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/lists.html, text whether it being formatted into paragraphs or simple lists (aka dot points/numbered) should be within a container (aka a div). A span element is a current and standardized method for modifying text within it's container, for example you have a div which is designed to show purple text but you want the last two words to be fluro green, you would wrap this last two words in a span and style it accordingly.
2009/3/3 K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au:
The author has only taken in account standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera to name a few) which is wrong since they are not 100% used, i believe IE 6 which is hardly compliant in these matters is still at 40% usage, thats just the people visually accessing (eg: monitor and web browser), we also have to take into account people using screen readers and other such methods for accessing the internet.
Careful design for graceful degradation should make it work well. i.e. if it looks good in lynx/links then that's a good start for screen reading, for those who don't have common screen reader software.
CSSisation strikes me as desirable, but working with/around IE6's utter brokenness is not optional.
- d.
2009/3/3 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
- d.
Hmm it's broken in seamonkey.
I like two things about CSS: it permits background colours. Why could they not hav just put bgcolor="" as a new attribute in a font? Many first choices of font face are ignored for not being present, while in PDF output, you get to say "Embed TrueType as subset: YES", following Adobe's style guide and a reasonable precaution against piracy that happens to be more compact.
I forget what the second thing about CSS that I like is. I was going to say that it made frames obsolete and potentially more numerous. I am thinking that frames tend to hold things that nobody really wants to print, because they do not do anything on paper.