Icon area for articles (Re: Anyone with CSS fu ...) - Wikitech-l

4 Jun 2010

Hi everyone,

In the "CSS fu" thread, we outlined a few problems with the positioning of
the lock icon.  This is particularly pronounced in Monobook, where the lock
covers up the "[dismiss]" link on the notification for many of us (maybe
everyone):
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Backmasking?useskin=monobook

Aryeh chimed in:

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com>
...
  wrote: 
...
  Try just putting [the pending changes lock icon] div
right before the <h1
 id="firstHeading"> or
 equivalent, and float: right it.  You can put some margins or padding
 on the top and/or right to adjust it a bit if you like.  Something
 like that should work.  This will be much more reliable than trying to
 absolutely position it, because different skins will use different
 heights, and the heights won't be consistent at all in the face of
 things like site notices. 

Everyone who has looked at it agrees we'd like to do it that way.  The
tricky part is that the other icons aren't being done that way, and the
hooks aren't there (currently) to inject the HTML in the best spot.

So, here's the plan we'd like to pursue:
1.  Short term: Adam is working out a CSS hack that puts the icon somewhere
marginally sensible.
2.  Longer term: we'd like to have a standard area in the skin for things
like this lock, the "featured article" star, and so on.  This is more
complicated than it would seem on the surface, because some of those icons
get placed there via template while others are placed there by something in
the PHP.

We're heads down on the launch, but if there's any enterprising developers
who would like to take on the challenge of solving this right, we'd love to
help you do it.  It may turn out that the CSS hack is more work than doing
it right, so we're putting this out there in hopes that someone will be the
hero and fix it right before we figure out how to do it the ugly way.

I filed this in Bugzilla so that we have a place to keep track of the
feature request:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23796

Rob