On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 5:43 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Why? It makes sense to have them with class="hiddencat" and using javascript (not AJAX) to toggle between 'user' and 'editor' view.
Also, i wonder how do you want to show and hide tocs ;)
TOCs are shown by default. If users have JavaScript, they will gain additional functionality, and be able to hide them. If they don't, the default display will be the same, they'll just be unable to change it dynamically -- since it's not technically possible to execute changes to the page without JavaScript, or of course reloading the page.
The suggestion here was to have the content included like any other content, but hidden using CSS. The implicit assumption here is that every user agent supports CSS. This is wrong; search engine spiders, for instance, do not. Not all mobile devices do, although that's changing. A small minority of users may also for whatever reason choose to use browsers such as lynx, that also do not support CSS.
Now, when a feature *needs* CSS or JS, and cannot be executed otherwise, we should use CSS and JS, with graceful fallback if the user agent doesn't have it. Graceful fallback doesn't include just displaying stuff that you meant to be hidden, without thinking about it. In some cases, it may actually include displaying stuff that's hidden for other users, but only when, *on consideration*, that's the best fallback possible. Since neither Jay nor you actually mentioned fallbacks, I assume you weren't thinking of them when you suggested to use CSS to hide things, which is where my response came from. I don't necessarily oppose display: none entirely; it has some perfectly legitimate uses.
In this case, I'm not sure we need an interface for this on the page at all. Instead, the page can be seen as a member of a category by looking at the category page. This is very reasonable for maintenance categories, where you usually don't need to know that a given article is tagged for cleanup if you're just reading it: the purpose of the category is to allow people to systematically go through all articles in the category, via the category page. Adding a button to show the hidden categories adds interface clutter and partially reintroduces the confusion for ordinary readers that the goal of hidden categories is to remove.
In some cases, furthermore, the reason for hiding categories may be that there are dozens of them, which repeat information already contained in displayed categories, and which are therefore useless for everyone -- see the proposal made a couple of days ago here to use this to increase the number of "manual category intersections" like "American artists", and have the visible categories be only atomic categories like "United States citizens" and "Artists". In this use case, any option to display all the categories on the page would just display a complete mess, and would be useless for anyone.
So I would say that __HIDDENCAT__ should just be hidden for now, period, no interface to display it. As time progresses and people start using the feature extensively, if people report that some additional level of display would be useful, we can discuss that then.