From: Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] editsection styling

Therefore, for this category of separator, I think pipes would be less jarring to readers -- at least English readers.

From: Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com

Jay's previous answer is correct I think. When choosing between pipes and commas, the former are better for clear separation between equal elements. However, the honest truth is that using punctuation to call out and separate interactive elements like this is a pretty retrograde UI pattern.

Images or symbols plus words are together more easily memorable than words alone. If you are in a situation where you let users interact with a LaTeX document using a variety of methods, the ideal design might be one where you give each type (log, pdf, dvi) a small, simple, and easily distinguishable icon. Adding things like appropriate styles on hover, to denote when a user is about to select an element, also might be helpful.

Ultimately I think we want to be shooting for a world where we can just use whitespace, icons, and other less busy-looking methods to denote section edit links,[1] rather than using punctuation.

Steven

1. https://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Acai_Designs#Section_Edit_Links

Thanks both - this is very useful. Steven - do you have any screenshots showing how you would prefer to represent multiple actions such as "Edit" and "Edit Source"?

LW