On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Daniel Schwen <lists(a)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.