Imagine there was a message so important that you show it at the top of the page, on every page on the whole site, and in every language; no matter if you are logged in or not, and no matter how many times you have seen it before.
Then imagine all you ever hear about these messages is a passing mention elsewhere,
The survey, which ran in a central sitenotice in October and November of last year ... and whether they donated to the Wikimedia Foundation (or not).
Of course they did not donate. They never saw any fundrasing, nor Wikimaina notices, so nobody ever encounters such users either.
In http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/42824 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com writes:
My understanding is that we use JS for this so that a) search engines don't pick up the notices (which are typically transient),
That is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also search engines request that you don't try to present different content to them than regular users. I'm sure site notices would not spoil search engine results.
b) we avoid Squid cache, so they can be visible immediately.
I.e., they are of the utmost importance that everybody see.
Please use a different technical solution. Site notices and ways to just see them once etc. have been around at least since UNIX. Never before has one used a method that excludes users of certain devices from ever knowing about them.
Isn't an accessible web site a pre-requisite for some grant monies? At least provide site messages that gracefully degrade if one does not use fancy browsers, but not disappear completely!
jidanni wrote:
Imagine there was a message so important that you show it at the top of the page, on every page on the whole site, and in every language; no matter if you are logged in or not, and no matter how many times you have seen it before.
Then imagine all you ever hear about these messages is a passing mention elsewhere,
The survey, which ran in a central sitenotice in October and November of last year ... and whether they donated to the Wikimedia Foundation (or not).Of course they did not donate. They never saw any fundrasing, nor Wikimaina notices, so nobody ever encounters such users either.
In http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/42824
wikitech-l is precisely the proper forum. Crossposting, please answer there.
Yes, the current solution isn't the best one. However, if the sitenotice were simply provided into the html, you'd need to purge *all* the pages on a sitenotice change. You don't want to take the site down just because a sitenotice change (temporarily) disabled the squid layer and thus the apaches aren't able to cope with the load!
Normal sitenotices are in html, without purging the squid cache, and thus unlogged user may be seeing a sitenotice up to 30 days old.
Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com writes:
My understanding is that we use JS for this so that a) search engines don't pick up the notices (which are typically transient),
That is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also search engines request that you don't try to present different content to them than regular users. I'm sure site notices would not spoil search engine results.
b) we avoid Squid cache, so they can be visible immediately.
I.e., they are of the utmost importance that everybody see.
Please use a different technical solution. Site notices and ways to just see them once etc. have been around at least since UNIX. Never before has one used a method that excludes users of certain devices from ever knowing about them.
That's because when you log into a UNIX machine, you're getting a connection just for you. Still, if you just connect using a "file-transfer device" (scp, rsync...) you won't see the messages the admin may have put there.
Isn't an accessible web site a pre-requisite for some grant monies? At least provide site messages that gracefully degrade if one does not use fancy browsers, but not disappear completely!
A browser with javascript isn't exactly the latest technology.
Having said that, you're right in that it's a problem with the current process. I propose that the globalsitenotice add a note to the html like "There's some important announcement on going, go to [[meta:Announcements]] to see latest announcements, or enable javascript."
(but unlogged users may still not see that for a month)
[snip]
As we've told you several times, we've made a deliberate trade-off choice.
1) The sitenotice is **not required** to use or operate the site; it's an extra. As such, not seeing it in an unsupported browser doesn't interfere with your ability to use the site -- this is called "graceful degradation" and is a web best practice.
2) Using JavaScript includes to maintain the notice avoids problems with caching and search engines indexing a temporary notice text for a long period.
So far this is the best way to provide a dynamic notice to the majority of our visitors without causing problems for others. If you have technical suggestions for alternate implementations, they're welcome in a more relevant channel such as wikitech-l.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco
Brion Vibber brion-AeOJrEpdGNeGglJvpFV4uA@public.gmane.org writes:
- The sitenotice is **not required** to use or operate the site; it's
an extra. As such, not seeing it in an unsupported browser doesn't interfere with your ability to use the site -- this is called "graceful degradation" and is a web best practice.
No. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation "the image on the left has been designed to degrade gracefully, hence is still meaningful without its transparency information".
Seeing the sitenotice *is* required to meaningfully participate in the Wikimedia community. Else one would never know about Wikimania, or any other event throughout the year.
If one couldn't see the whole site at all, one would be aware of what one is missing. Instead, everything looks hunky dory. It's just that one never receives party invitations.
If you have technical suggestions for alternate implementations, they're welcome in a more relevant channel such as wikitech-l.
OK, fair enough. I was just hoping there was some list where somebody still remembered accessibility.
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:06 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
OK, fair enough. I was just hoping there was some list where somebody still remembered accessibility.
Surely MediaWiki is more accessible than 90% of the web software out there . . .
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:06 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Seeing the sitenotice *is* required to meaningfully participate in the Wikimedia community. Else one would never know about Wikimania, or any other event throughout the year.
A sitenotice is very rarely the *only* thing we do to announce something. We also post it on mailing lists, VPs, and other wikis are fine to repost it in other locations that they list announcements.
Actually, I cannot think of a single example where the CentralNotice and only the CentralNotice was used to alert people of anything. The closest I can come is emergency notices like http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sitenotice&diff...
I'm not particularly concerned, when there are actual problems with accessibility which need to be solved. Perhaps those should receive some focus, instead of this invented problem.
-Mike
On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 05:57 -0400, Casey Brown wrote:
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:06 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Seeing the sitenotice *is* required to meaningfully participate in the Wikimedia community. Else one would never know about Wikimania, or any other event throughout the year.
A sitenotice is very rarely the *only* thing we do to announce something. We also post it on mailing lists, VPs, and other wikis are fine to repost it in other locations that they list announcements.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org