Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 9/9/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Thank you for selective snipping, in this way a solution to your long argument was removed. To recapitulate, we can have options for under the left mouse click. Think solutions please.
If you make clicking on the image do the expected thing for navigation uses, then you obscure the attribution. Hiding the attribution behind an abnormal procedure would be a failure to provide attribution, hiding the navigational use behind an abnormal procedure would fail to aid navigation. I did address this directly in my reply.
If the current way of providing attribution does not work because of a need to be innovative than we need to change our way in which we attribute. Currently we do attribute by having a "click through" to the image page. We could have in a similar way as we currently do the citations have footnotes with pictures. These footnotes would consist of a name and a license identification and a link to the image page. I would even be in favour of having a separate tab with the citations because both citations and other comments detract from reading the article.
Further, it would be quite infuriating and not at all user friendly for Wikipedia to further override the browsers normal behavior. (making right click, or modifier-click (recall not all computers have two mouse buttons) do something other than bring up the browsers menu)... Not to mention the accessibility problems, and browser compatibility issues.
Why would it infuriate you? There are many applications that support these kind of things. Denying this is equally infuriating because it prevents you in thinking what you can do. Browser compatibility .. sure they are .. one of the best things about the automatic update procedures of Firefox and Internet Exlorer is that they replace the old versions and thereby remove the need to support many old incompatible browsers. People that do not have a mouse or have a text only browser have a big problem on the web. Our software could do much better in supporting the visually impaired if we spend effort in doing so. Preventing the use of pictures as a navigational aid is not the best way, it is ducking that problem.
Some time back (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-May/035663.html) I'd proposed we simply create a new type of image tag such as:
[[Imagelink:Foo.jpg|100px|Foo page]]
Here is an example of what such a tag would look like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/example
I had a look, I think it is an effort but I think it clutters the total image of the page up. I would prefer to use part of what you have done there and link it to a footnote. Oh, and nobody having implemented it when you proposed something ? That is the norm not the exception.
Thanks, GerardM