On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 02:54:46PM +0100, tarquin wrote:
Jens Frank wrote:
I drafted a compromise design:
http://jeluf.mine.nu/jf/kiribati/
The right side is used to place the floats,
Those are not floats! It's still table-based.
OK, misnomer. Floats from the article's point of view, in contrast to inlined images. Elements that don't have to have a fixed position to the article but can be freely placed by the designer.
while the left side uses some 60% of the screen width for the article. On my 1024x768 screen this results in about 50 em text width.
There are still many 460x480 screens out there! A default skin must cater to those.
On 640x480, the text is fully readable, you have to scroll horizontally to read the sidebars. Since those are independent contextual strings, this seems acceptable to me.
Note the "edit..."-links at the top of each float. Those should ideally be editable on its own. A new box can be added using the toolbox containing all the edit links.
It's interesting the way that "interior" elements such as the images and the statistics table are placed above the "system" elements. How would that be achieved? What if the stats are not the same width as the system elements? And I'm not sure it's a good idea to mix system stuff with article content.
The stats and the system elements have been forced to have the same width. This should be possible for almost any of our factsheets. The few exceptions should be rendered inline anyway, they are probably to wide to be a good floats, anyway. Else you will get text like this when using 640x480 text resoluti on.
Taking the stats out of the article is probably only feasible by completly changing the way we handle them. Currenty they are inlined into the wiki, ugly since it's hard core HTML. Going to a design like Kiribati would be easiest when "sidebar elements" become wikipedia articles of its own. That's also why they have an edit link.
Regarding mixing: Perhaps the colour code should be changed, e.g. gray background for all the system stuff, white for the article, the sidebar could be either blue (making it a thing of its own) or white (showing it's part of the article). For me those don't strictly belong to the article, that's why I made them blue.
BTW, I'm not sure this is a good approach, too. I just try to be bold because I think the current design is a little bit old fashioned.
Regards,
JeLuF