There's discussion on Polish wikipedia about new skin based on Cologne Blue.
As for now, there's no consensus for change, but who knows what people will
think after a few more changes :)
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskusja_Wikipedii:Propozycje_do_nowej_sk%C3%B…
Modifications so far:
* quickbar much more readable, with higher lines, no underlining, centered headings,
less bold text, no OK buttons, and no fourth link to main page
* quick login in quickbar
* all underlining turned off
=== About underlined links ===
I think that there should be 2 options:
* no underlining at all
* underlined links in article, but not in quickbar
Instead of current:
* no underlining at all
* underlined links in article, and in quickbar
=== Modifications ===
I think these modifications should be incorporated into Cologne Blue
on every wikipedia, whether it will be default or not.
=== Screenshot ===
Newest is at http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskusja_Wikipedii:Propozycje_do_nowej_sk%C3%B…
=== Quick Login ===
I think every skin should have it. PHP code to do this works fine to me.
Of course labels must be shorter than on login page.
When I try "wget http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden", the only
response I get is HTTP status 403 "Forbidden". Lynx and other web
browsers work OK. How come? It worked fine until Jan 28, 2003.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/
Some data about size of Recent Changes and possible optimalizations.
RC (Polish, anonymous) for 250 articles has 198 720 bytes.
Some possible improvements:
* not generating space after <li> 249 bytes saved
* not generating newlines 356 bytes saved
* using <i> not <em> 319 bytes saved
* using <b> not <strong> 1219 bytes saved
* not generating </li> 1249 bytes saved
* not using class='internal'
(by making this default case) 4555 bytes saved
* not generating title="..." 7329 bytes saved
* using relative links for links to
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 7713 bytes saved
* not generating PHPSESSID=... in links 9674 bytes saved
So:
* trivial markup changes - 2143 bytes, or 1.1% saved
* ... + making internal links default - 6698 bytes, or 3.4% saved
(this is trivial and doesn't affect anything)
* ... + relative links - 14411 bytes, or 7.3%
(still doesn't affect anything, but implementing generation of relative
links may be a bit tricky as we allow many different paths to
the same thing)
* doing all these changes except not generating </li> - 31414 bytes, or 15.8% saved
(it may have some minor effect on functionality)
* doing all these changes - 33047 bytes, or 16.6% saved
(won't be xhtml-compatible, but perfect html)
I'm sure I read about a new way to link to a user contributions page.
But what is it?
[[contributions:212.50.183.100]] ?
Or is this only on the text server?
Paddington skin leaves even less screen space for the article itself.
Remember we will have an oversized TOC soon as well.
People with 800x600 screens (still plenty of them) will see hardly any
text without scrolling.
Headers are still way oversized. Newspapers use headers this big
whenever a Titanic sinks somewhere.
'Wikipedia English' in two different point sizes and grey for the
variable part, very bad to the eyes.
This design (in progress, I know) will produce even more cases of Severe
Wikipedia Reader Stress Syndrome.
Erik Zachte
May I suggest we use a non-serif font for the headers (sans-serif or
Arial or Verdana or whatever).
Serif has been invented to facilitate the reader in following a line of
text without hopping from one line to another inadvertently.
It is a compromise at best on monitors because it really needs a fine
resolution for all nifty details. Non-serif fonts generally give a less
crowded appearance. Since the 'skipping a line' arguments does not hold
for headers one often sees a combination of body text in serif, headers
in sans-serif.
Of course it is also a matter of taste and what one is used to. Speaking
of taste: sans-serif tends to be seen as slightly more modern. I bet the
Times will be the last to abandon Times Roman, even for headers. :-)
Erik Zachte
Hello everyone, the Hebrew wikipedia is currently having a "logo
contest" for the site's logo and there are already three proposals, I
would like to know how to replace the standard (english) one with the
new one. So I have a number of qustions:
* How to replace the logo if the target (new) file is PNG?
* How to replace the logo if the target is JPG?
* Can we have a different logos for regular articles (with white
background) and a different one for the meta namespace (with yellow
background) assuming IE's problem with transparant colour PNGs isn't
solved (as it probably won't)?
An unrelated question: can I make all links non-underlined by default
for anonymous users? (to make the site more pretty and attractive. As
Hebrew internet indexes currently rate wikipedia in english 3/5 and
everything2 5/5 probably just because of the layout thing, damn its ugly!!)
Some links:
Hebrew wikipedia: http://he.wikipedia.org
Logo contest (just look at the original proposals):
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%93%D7%99%D7%…
-- Rotem Dan (p.s: Hebrew wikipedia got 85 articles and 4500 page views
in the past 4 days and is rapidly getting new participants, as there
are already about 20)
* makes class='internal' default, saving lot of bytes
* changes all <em> to <i>
* changes all <strong> to <b>
(nobody showed actual case where it breaks something, so ...)
* a few one-byte optimalizations here and there
Improvement is not going to be big - using relative links would have
bigger effect that all these combined - but it's trivial and shouldn't
break anything.
It definitely needs testing (but I couldn't apply it to instalation at
test.wikipedia.org, as it's a bit far from CVS now), especially:
* how it changes rendering with underlining turned off.
css code is a bit suspicions here, but results look
fine to me.
* does changing <strong>/<em> to <b>/<i> affect anything ?
it shouldn't, and if it does we need to fix css code, not
keep wasting bytes version.
In CVS:
1) Stylesheet changes:
- smaller headlines in standard skin
- slightly smaller font for menu links
- headlines have thin gray underline
- thinner borders
- footer in blue box
2) Skin changes:
- changed default color for non-article pages
- removed "Special pages" dropdown -- takes space,
causes display bugs and is hardly used
3) Preferences:
- put all checkbox prefs in a table so they are
properly aligned
4) Section editing:
- new option for editing sections by right clicking
titles (onContextMenu); works in Mozilla & IE
- new functionality for appending text to pages, currently
displayed only for Talk pages as "Post a comment"
(summary field becomes comment subject)
5) Table of contents:
- moved table properties to stylesheet
- modified Brion's JavaScript so that instead of
[show/hide], show link is shown when table invisible,
hide link is shown when table visible
- changed table color, centered headline
- __NOTOC__ (not case sensitive) in article body
suppresses TOC display
Regards,
Erik
If you really want to reduce bandwidth and server load:
Open a new window when a user clicks a link in Recent Changes.
If a user follows a link and returns to Recent Changes MS Explorer
reloads the page (at least with default settings).
This may be lame behaviour by MSIE, yet it is a fact we have to live
with.
I brought this up once before and the reaction was: there are better
browsers so dump MSIE. My point is: MSIE is still a de facto standard,
90% of the Wp visitors use it, so we better deal with it.
Erik Zachte