Hi Simetrical,
Regarding your complaint about confusion of meaning - that a user will confuse the meaning of the symbol. As I understand it, that's what the universal edit button initiative is meant to solve.
There are already a large number of symbols which are understood by the general populace, making one for "edit this" seems a worthy endeavor - as the concept is appearing more and more often.
Off the top of my head, here are a few other symbols with known meaning:
* Left arrow: go back / reverse * Right arrow: go forward / advance * Circular arrow: refresh * House: Home page * Red X or white X against a solid red circle: Stop * Speech bubble (as in a cartoon): Chat * 3 1/4 Floppy disk: Save * White curves on orange background: RSS/Atom feed * Isosceles triangle facing rightwards: Play or GO
These are just a few I can see here on Gmail running in Firefox - I'm sure there are myriad others. Unfortunately, one thing for which there isn't a universal symbol yet is "edit this". Hopefully there will be soon, and we won't have to have this debate :)
-- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw)
On 7/2/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/2/07, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
Hence my suggestion to include the full textual message within the
"title"
attribute, which would appear as a tooltip.
Which will only appear if people actually hover over it, rather than anytime they happen to glance in that direction.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, unless someone provides good evidence that there's a concrete advantage to this, I'm going with my hunches and not personally implementing icons, although if specific wikis would like to they should be (and are) able to.
Editing MediaWiki namespace is only available to admins: I'm asking for
a
solution which is available to anybody.
Users who want to change it for themselves can use CSS, yes (.editsection a { color: transparent; background-image: ...; display: block; width: ...; height: ...; overflow: hidden; } or variants thereof), yes, and you don't need to resort to MySkin. (This happens to be possible to do with CSS, but even if it weren't it would certainly be easy with JavaScript, like virtually any other interface change. It's not even really necessary to ask whether it's possible to change the interface, the answer is virtually always yes if you're using JavaScript.)
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