(from foundation-l)
On 5/21/06, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
Section editing is certainly counterintuitive for most, especially for sections more than a paragraph or two long—I invariably edit a section after I've read it, meaning I have to scroll/page back up for the link, and I remember it taking a while for me to get used to this. What's more, the link actually comes before the section heading, so only a graphical, CSS-enabled browser will display it in anything approaching a reasonable way.
When I coded section editing, I tried different ways to present the link; it was very hard to find something which works even with complex table layouts. I would actually prefer a small icon to the "[edit]" text (it could still have "[edit]" as an ALT attribute), but that has the problem of not working well with different heading sizes.
Regarding the scroll-up problem, one way to deal with it at least for advanced users would be to offer double-click editing on the section level. You could then click anywhere within a section to edit it.
Erik
On 5/21/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
When I coded section editing, I tried different ways to present the link; it was very hard to find something which works even with complex table layouts. I would actually prefer a small icon to the "[edit]" text (it could still have "[edit]" as an ALT attribute), but that has the problem of not working well with different heading sizes.
Would it be possible to (perhaps as an option) allow a tiny icon at the end of each section which lets you edit it?
Regarding the scroll-up problem, one way to deal with it at least for advanced users would be to offer double-click editing on the section level. You could then click anywhere within a section to edit it.
Personally I've never found the double-click option at all intuitive or useful. I've only ever invoked it by accident. If there was a way of adding an entry to the right click menu, that would be better.
Steve
"Steve Bennett" wrote
Personally I've never found the double-click option at all intuitive or useful. I've only ever invoked it by accident. If there was a way of adding an entry to the right click menu, that would be better.
Steve
You'd need the collaboration of the browser. It'd be easy if done as a firefox extension, but can't provide it only with the page. Moreover you may javascript it and show a custom menu, but'd lose your normal right-button menu.
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/21/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
When I coded section editing, I tried different ways to present the link; it was very hard to find something which works even with complex table layouts. I would actually prefer a small icon to the "[edit]" text (it could still have "[edit]" as an ALT attribute), but that has the problem of not working well with different heading sizes.
Would it be possible to (perhaps as an option) allow a tiny icon at the end of each section which lets you edit it?
I have never found it hard to edit at the beginning of the section, the PageUp key works just fine.
The problem I've had is the edit box sometimes cannot be found, as it is in some incongruous place after having been moved by floating images. As the section header can be very short (the edit link away on the right is easy to miss), or very long with multiple lines (the edit link can appear disassociated with the section heading).
An icon with alt text might be nice, but it should be placed at the *left* of the section header, where it is quite firmly attached.
However, I'd rather the section header itself be a link that edits the section. No muss no fuss.
Unfortunately, that would conflict with some folks that stick a page or category reference in the section header text, despite guidelines that recommend against the practice.
All in all, the current practice is not perfect, but it's hard to come up with something universally better....
Regarding the scroll-up problem, one way to deal with it at least for advanced users would be to offer double-click editing on the section level. You could then click anywhere within a section to edit it.
Personally I've never found the double-click option at all intuitive or useful. I've only ever invoked it by accident. If there was a way of adding an entry to the right click menu, that would be better.
What right-click menu? I'm a Mac user....
No, double click is *execute* not edit.
On 5/21/06, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
I have never found it hard to edit at the beginning of the section, the PageUp key works just fine.
It's not intuitive though - at least, it wasn't to me for a very long time. Why? Probably because you think in terms of adding something to the bottom of the section. "Oh, I'll just add a sentence down the end there" - counterintuitive to scroll back up to the top, to click edit, to then scroll down again. However, if there was a marker at the end of the section, there would be an ambiguity - do you want to edit the section, subsection, subsubsection etc.
The problem I've had is the edit box sometimes cannot be found, as it is in some incongruous place after having been moved by floating images. As the section header can be very short (the edit link away on the right is easy to miss), or very long with multiple lines (the edit link can appear disassociated with the section heading).
This mostly seems to happen when images are "stacked" rather than spread out throughout the article. That is:
Image Image Image Text Text Text
Rather than:
Image Text Image Text Image Text
See [[Marseille]] for a current example. The "culture" section has 5 stacked images, which leads to 6 [edit] links appearing on the same line.
An icon with alt text might be nice, but it should be placed at the *left* of the section header, where it is quite firmly attached.
That would seem to solve a lot of problems. Particularly if it was outside the left margin.
All in all, the current practice is not perfect, but it's hard to come up with something universally better....
We don't need anything universal. It'd be good to have some more advanced interfaces for editing Wikipedia with, though. Someone must have come up with something WYSIWYG by now, right?
Steve
William Allen Simpson-2 wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
Personally I've never found the double-click option at all intuitive or useful.
No, double click is *execute* not edit.
In this context, to "execute" might well be taken to mean "edit"...what else would one think might be accomplished by "executing" a section or indeed a whole page?
HTH HAND
On 5/24/06, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
In this context, to "execute" might well be taken to mean "edit"...what else would one think might be accomplished by "executing" a section or indeed a whole page?
I'm not aware of any webpage where double-clicking the page has any particular meaning. Outside of webpages, it's fairly common in graphical development GUIs (VB, Delphi etc) for doubleclicking an item to lead to editing the code for it. But in word processing packages, I can't think of many scenarios where you need to double click to edit a section.
I don't think it's a particularly good paradigm. When navigating Wikipedia, one very frequently needs to click at least once on an area to get the focus there, and it's fairly easy to accidentally double click, leading to a most unexpected result.
Anyone know of any reports or discussions about whether people actually use the existing double-click feature?
Steve
"Phil Boswell" wrote:
In this context, to "execute" might well be taken to mean "edit"...what else would one think might be accomplished by "executing" a section or indeed a whole page?
HTH HAND
Phil
Maybe i wanted to select the whole word? I recently read a web page where if i clicked on it, it lead me to the top. As i am used to select the zone of the text i was reading, the page colors were awful, and it was a large page... well, it was really annoying. I had to deactivate javascript....
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