On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
- It adds random text to the category display, instead of using nice
icons.
Why would you call the + - and +/- links "random text"? And why would icons be "nice"?! ...
- Uses icons for the actions.
Not necessarily an improvement
I'll chip in that I'm not a big fan of icons.
* Heavy icon use means a lot of extra HTTP requests. * Icons noticeably disrupt page load, since the browser has to request each separately, and usually it's rendered the empty spot where the image should be before it actually loads the image. This results in the page changing as it loads, with some empty space appearing and then getting filled in. * Icons are often a lot less comprehensible than text. The word "Reply" in your local language is totally unambiguous -- a little arrow of some kind is much less clear. Very few icons are so ubiquitous that they're really as comprehensible as text, IMO (examples would be the standard "play", "fast forward", and so on). In LQT I only figured out what one of the icons meant by asking Werdna. It was apparently meant to be a link from a chain -- which I didn't even recognize -- and that apparently meant "get a link to this post" -- which I didn't figure out from the fact that it was a chain, and which makes no sense in most non-English languages anyway. * Icons make it a lot harder to reskin the software. You can't even change the color scheme significantly without all the icons suddenly clashing. Instead of being able to recolor by adding just a couple of lines of CSS (which can be obtained from a tutorial or #mediawiki or whatever if you don't know CSS), you suddenly have to know how to use Photoshop too. I recolored my wiki (http://www.twcenter.net/wiki) in a few minutes to match my site's color scheme; I doubt I'll ever end up recoloring any icons.
I think the almost icon-free style that the MediaWiki interface has had to date is the right way to go. I've noted this before to Werdna more than once, and I've heard other people make the same point, but I don't think I've ever seen a detailed response.