On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:
I would actually suggest that we try somehow to change the "look and feel" of the special namespaces, so that people will just SEE the distinction as they browse through our site.
I think that's what is bugging me about the "()", in a way. Talk pages are not just a variant of encyclopedia articles, they're something else entirely, even though they use the same interface and syntax. The hardwired ":" character makes a clear distinction between the pages types, while "()" does not. There are already some articles with "()" in the name, and I'm afraid the talk, wikipedia and user pages would blend into each other again if we stop using the ":".
Yes! So Mark is right, here: the other namespaces need some different sort of look and feel. Different background colors, anyway, something like that.
I agree that the special namespaces should be distingushed more from the encyclopedia pages. Again, this is more a layout problem than anything else. How about marking the namespace part of the title in red, of italics?
The namespace part of the URL doesn't have to appear in the title at all (as it doesn't for special: pages--odd); in fact, probably shouldn't since it's so ugly. But maybe there should be some indication on the page of how to link to the page, perhaps just below the title. Maybe something like this:
[=+[=+Talk section+=]+=] <-- This is a distinctive talk section header Philosophy <-- page name (link to this page with <aColor>[[talk:Philosophy]]</aColor>) <--notice
The namespace display should also be updated. The link to the Talk namespace should probably get a special position, or an icon or something.
Yes, clearly some special treatment. One shouldn't need to know that, in order to talk about an article, one should click on the "Talk" link (the reader might well say: "Gee, is that a link or cryptic green colored text?") that follows "Other namespaces" ("What the hell is a namespace? Nothing I'd be interested in, because I don't even know what 'namespace' means.")
I think Larry agrees with me that hardwireing is a *good* thing to sepetate the actual articles from the "surrounding" pages. That was *one* of the reasons we made meta.wikipedia.com, right?
Right! As I said when it was being made, I wouldn't be entirely averse to there being a meta: namespace--as long as the meta: namespace had a separate Recent Changes page.
Larry