This is a proposal to change how the MediaWiki software displays subpages. This isn't really an issue over a Wikipedia because subpages in the main namespace are disabled, but using subpages at Wikisource is a standard way of dividing up works, leaving only a table of contents at the root article.
The problem is that this results in pages titles like this:
United States Code/Title 35/Chapter 14/Section 151
or even
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume I/Constantine/The Life of Constantine/Book II/Chapter 23
which IMHO looks more like a file system than a user-friendly website. I would suggest
United States Code » Title 35 » Chapter 14 » Section 151
or my own favourite
United States Code » Title 35 » Chapter 14 » Section 151
(With "Section 151" in bigger font.)
This would effectively involve moving the subpages div above the title and changing the title from the entire path to just the subpage name.
See: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#Subpage_formatting for the discussion I started on Wikisource and further down the same page
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Wikisource:Scriptorium#Subpage_formatting:_some_more_examples for some formatted versions of the above examples
and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post- Nicene_Fathers:_Series_II/Volume_I/Constantine/ The_Life_of_Constantine/Book_II/Chapter_23 and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_European_Union/ Protocol_on_the_convergence_criteria_referred_to_in_Article_109j_of_the_ Treaty_establishing_the_European_Community
for examples of how ugly the current setup can be.
Michael
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
I would suggest
United States Code » Title 35 » Chapter 14 » Section 151
or my own favourite
United States Code » Title 35 » Chapter 14 » Section 151
(With "Section 151" in bigger font.)
Then it wouldn't be possible to link to the page by copy-pasting the page title, which we've always been very careful to make sure it's been possible to do. I'm not saying this is prohibitive for wikis like Wikisource that rely so heavily on subpages, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind. What would be the best way to address that? Ignore it? Allow " » " as an alternate subpage separator?
Then it wouldn't be possible to link to the page by copy-pasting the page title, which we've always been very careful to make sure it's been possible to do. I'm not saying this is prohibitive for wikis like Wikisource that rely so heavily on subpages, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind. What would be the best way to address that? Ignore it? Allow " » " as an alternate subpage separator?
Maybe have a little button in the right/opposite corner that you click and uses js magic to copy it to the clipboard maybe?
Hopefully, if the new DISPLAYTITLE functionality goes into effect, the effect of this can be done.
X!
On Dec 29, 2008, at 9:59 PM [Dec 29, 2008 ], K. Peachey wrote:
Then it wouldn't be possible to link to the page by copy-pasting the page title, which we've always been very careful to make sure it's been possible to do. I'm not saying this is prohibitive for wikis like Wikisource that rely so heavily on subpages, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind. What would be the best way to address that? Ignore it? Allow " » " as an alternate subpage separator?
Maybe have a little button in the right/opposite corner that you click and uses js magic to copy it to the clipboard maybe? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Traditionally in cases where the title does not actually depict the title itself properly I believe the idea has been to add some sort of "Full title: ..." to the subtitle. Actually, you could almost consider this case one where you're basically switching the split up subpages which are normally a subtitle, with the full title which is normally the header.
This kind of functionally was actually one I was thinking of adding both in the Title rewrite (defunct), and another project (might be finding a different method instead).
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) ~Profile/Portfolio: http://nadir-seen-fire.com -The Nadir-Point Group (http://nadir-point.com) --It's Wiki-Tools subgroup (http://wiki-tools.com) --The ElectronicMe project (http://electronic-me.org) -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) --Animepedia (http://anime.wikia.com) --Narutopedia (http://naruto.wikia.com)
Soxred93 wrote:
Hopefully, if the new DISPLAYTITLE functionality goes into effect, the effect of this can be done.
X!
On Dec 29, 2008, at 9:59 PM [Dec 29, 2008 ], K. Peachey wrote:
Then it wouldn't be possible to link to the page by copy-pasting the page title, which we've always been very careful to make sure it's been possible to do. I'm not saying this is prohibitive for wikis like Wikisource that rely so heavily on subpages, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind. What would be the best way to address that? Ignore it? Allow " » " as an alternate subpage separator?
Maybe have a little button in the right/opposite corner that you click and uses js magic to copy it to the clipboard maybe? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Soxred93 soxred93@gmail.com wrote:
Hopefully, if the new DISPLAYTITLE functionality goes into effect, the effect of this can be done.
What new DISPLAYTITLE functionality? Is this separate from https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12998 ?
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 9:59 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Maybe have a little button in the right/opposite corner that you click and uses js magic to copy it to the clipboard maybe?
That's just not intuitive. People are going to try copying it and it won't work.
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Daniel Friesen dan_the_man@telus.net wrote:
Traditionally in cases where the title does not actually depict the title itself properly I believe the idea has been to add some sort of "Full title: ..." to the subtitle.
This is ugly and confusing, and people still are going to try copying it directly and it won't work.
I think that 301ing pages with " » " in their title to pages with "/" is the best way here, for Wikisource and other projects that want prettier subpage display for deeply nested subpages (probably not for Wikipedia, although you can make an argument for consistency).
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 9:59 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Maybe have a little button in the right/opposite corner that you click and uses js magic to copy it to the clipboard maybe?
That's just not intuitive. People are going to try copying it and it won't work.
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Daniel Friesen dan_the_man@telus.net wrote:
Traditionally in cases where the title does not actually depict the title itself properly I believe the idea has been to add some sort of "Full title: ..." to the subtitle.
This is ugly and confusing, and people still are going to try copying it directly and it won't work.
I think that 301ing pages with " » " in their title to pages with "/" is the best way here, for Wikisource and other projects that want prettier subpage display for deeply nested subpages (probably not for Wikipedia, although you can make an argument for consistency).
What about providing " » " as a image with alt="/" ?
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
What about providing " » " as a image with alt="/" ?
1) That's just horribly ugly when the other solution would be simple enough.
2) Can we rely on the fact that images are copy-pasted as their alt text in all browsers?
On 30 Dec 2008, at 22:13, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
What about providing " » " as a image with alt="/" ?
- That's just horribly ugly when the other solution would be
simple enough.
- Can we rely on the fact that images are copy-pasted as their alt
text in all browsers
What about programming the software to replace " » " in links with "/" before submitting to the database or previewing the page.
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 8:01 PM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
What about programming the software to replace " » " in links with "/" before submitting to the database or previewing the page.
More pre-save transforms? We should probably be reducing the number, not increasing them. This one has more merit than pipe tricks, though. It's a possibility. It would probably be simpler to do the 301, though.
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 8:01 PM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
What about programming the software to replace " » " in links with "/" before submitting to the database or previewing the page.
More pre-save transforms? We should probably be reducing the number, not increasing them. This one has more merit than pipe tricks, though. It's a possibility. It would probably be simpler to do the 301, though.
If not a PST, it would pretty much have to be done in title normalization. For one thing, we'd need it for link existence checks.
But I have a simpler suggestion: why not display the title just like we do now, but use CSS to add some padding around the slashes and to render everything up to the last slash in smaller font on a separate line? Should be easy enough to do with just a couple of simple <span> tags, and be perfectly cut-and-pasteable. Granted, it means sticking with "/" as the delimiter instead of "»", but I wouldn't think that'd be a blocking issue.
Back on the image note..... Why alt? it doesn't have to be alt, a background image should be suitable. Break up a title by / wrap each section in a span and place proper padding on them -- ;) if you want to do something real nice, turn everything but the last portion into a link -- and replace every / by a span containing / with display: none; and followed by an empty span with a background image.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) ~Profile/Portfolio: http://nadir-seen-fire.com -The Nadir-Point Group (http://nadir-point.com) --It's Wiki-Tools subgroup (http://wiki-tools.com) --The ElectronicMe project (http://electronic-me.org) -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) --Animepedia (http://anime.wikia.com) --Narutopedia (http://naruto.wikia.com)
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 8:01 PM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
What about programming the software to replace " » " in links with "/" before submitting to the database or previewing the page.
More pre-save transforms? We should probably be reducing the number, not increasing them. This one has more merit than pipe tricks, though. It's a possibility. It would probably be simpler to do the 301, though.
If not a PST, it would pretty much have to be done in title normalization. For one thing, we'd need it for link existence checks.
But I have a simpler suggestion: why not display the title just like we do now, but use CSS to add some padding around the slashes and to render everything up to the last slash in smaller font on a separate line? Should be easy enough to do with just a couple of simple <span> tags, and be perfectly cut-and-pasteable. Granted, it means sticking with "/" as the delimiter instead of "»", but I wouldn't think that'd be a blocking issue.
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:03 PM, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
If not a PST, it would pretty much have to be done in title normalization. For one thing, we'd need it for link existence checks.
Yes, title normalization would be the right place if we did this.
But I have a simpler suggestion: why not display the title just like we do now, but use CSS to add some padding around the slashes and to render everything up to the last slash in smaller font on a separate line? Should be easy enough to do with just a couple of simple <span> tags, and be perfectly cut-and-pasteable. Granted, it means sticking with "/" as the delimiter instead of "»", but I wouldn't think that'd be a blocking issue.
That's a good idea. If you put it on a separate line (say with display: block; for the last part), will browsers insert a line break when you copy-paste? Firefox seems to in a quick test, although I wasn't very exact (maybe it special-cases <p> or checks margins or something). I would expect it to generate the newline, as a user.
I don't think the last part is necessarily what we want to emphasize, anyway. If you have a title like "Principia Mathematica/Part 1", you want to emphasize the first part of the title more, surely. Having the name of the work in small print and the section in large print seems backwards to me.
It should be pointed out that we could do whatever we want with the <title> attribute of articles, since there's no copy-pasting problem there.
I don't think the last part is necessarily what we want to emphasize, anyway. If you have a title like "Principia Mathematica/Part 1", you want to emphasize the first part of the title more, surely. Having the name of the work in small print and the section in large print seems backwards to me.
This really depends. Books normally have the book title in small print in the corner with the chapter title in bigger print in the centre of the page at the beginning of each chapter. Not a great example I know. I've written a (very rough and ready) javascript to demonstrate how title would look under my proposal here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Blue-Haired_Lawyer/hierarchy.js
On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
This really depends. Books normally have the book title in small print in the corner with the chapter title in bigger print in the centre of the page at the beginning of each chapter.
The nature of books is such that you almost inevitably see the cover of the book (which contains the title) before you ever look at the inside, so you don't necessarily need reminders of the title. On the other hand, web pages can expect many if not most visitors to reach any given page by direct links, skipping any material that might have given them an earlier clue to the title. So I'm not sure print is a good analogy for what we should do here.
On 4 Jan 2009, at 19:03, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
This really depends. Books normally have the book title in small print in the corner with the chapter title in bigger print in the centre of the page at the beginning of each chapter.
The nature of books is such that you almost inevitably see the cover of the book (which contains the title) before you ever look at the inside, so you don't necessarily need reminders of the title. On the other hand, web pages can expect many if not most visitors to reach any given page by direct links, skipping any material that might have given them an earlier clue to the title. So I'm not sure print is a good analogy for what we should do here.
Ok, i have better examples.
In any hierarchical file system there is a certain amount of logic having the filename, "Part 1" displayed in (slightly) bigger font than the path, "Principia Mathematica".
Other internet directories typically display the last part in bigger print. Open directory do this: http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/Europe/Italy/
On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Michael J. Walsh michaelj.walsh@oceanfree.net wrote:
Ok, i have better examples.
In any hierarchical file system there is a certain amount of logic having the filename, "Part 1" displayed in (slightly) bigger font than the path, "Principia Mathematica".
Filenames conventionally encode information in a way that section numbers don't. In MediaWiki itself, Brion reverted a change a while ago which changed SpecialFoo.php to specials/Foo.php. He changed it to specials/SpecialFoo.php, putting info in the filename that's redundant to the path. This is because applications expect the filename to have meaning on its own, even if you strip the path. Text editors commonly put the filename on the tab, but not the path.
Other internet directories typically display the last part in bigger print. Open directory do this: http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/Europe/Italy/
But in this case, "Italy" logically implies "Europe" and "Regional". The latter two pieces of info are in fact entirely redundant. "Part 1" does not logically imply "Principia Mathematica" at all: in fact, if you don't already know you're reading Principia Mathematica, "Part 1" is completely useless as an identifier.
It would be like having the <title> for an old version of a page in MediaWiki be "Revision as of 2008-01-04" instead of "Articlename". "Articlename - revision as of 2008-01-04" might be better still, but if you're going to emphasize one piece of information, it should be which article it is, not which part of the article. Similarly, we put the site name at the end of the title, not at the beginning, so if you have many tabs open from the same site, you can easily tell them apart.
I think it's clear that analogies exist in both directions here. If this is going to move forward (which looks vaguely unlikely), the format needs to be considered on its own merits, not by analogy.
Michael J. Walsh wrote:
I've written a (very rough and ready) javascript to demonstrate how title would look under my proposal here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Blue-Haired_Lawyer/hierarchy.js
Doesn't seem to work for me, for some reason. Anyway, here's an (equally rough) mockup of my proposal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilmari_Karonen/fancysubpagetitle.js
There's a known positioning issue on the Modern skin, and it could otherwise be improved in various ways, such as by incorporating the base page links currently shown below the title into the fancy title itself, but it demonstrates that the CSS trick I proposed does work, and (at least in Firefox) allows the title to remain cut-and-pasteable.
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