(Re: http://unicorn.wmflabs.org/navmod/)
Jared Zimmerman wrote:
MZMcBride wrote:
the section highlighting is neat, but may have difficulty integrating with VisualEditor
Doubt it will be difficult since it has nothing to do with VE (its before VE is invoked) but VE section editing is in the works so we're aligned on that.
Hi.
I've tsked Erik for this previously, but please don't talk to me like I'm other people. :-) (A Sorkinism, to be sure.)
You're not seeing the whole board. When I say that VisualEditor needs consideration, I do so with significant experience in the Wikimedia world.
When designing for Wikimedia, we're fairly confident that the future will move toward VisualEditor. How our users dive into editing is incredibly important and fundamental. James F. and others shared thoughts about the future of section-editing at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/48429, including musings about whether it should continue to exist.
We should be thinking at a much higher level about how we want people to be able to dive into editing. Double-clicking? A single edit button? A magical cursor? Blue flashing section-edit buttons?
There are real challenges to implementing this particular mock. The most obvious is probably: how will we reconcile the current [edit | edit source] world?
The second is how the behavior can be predictable. Consider:
--- = Page title = Intro text here. [edit]
== Header == [edit] Text here.
=== Subheader === [edit] Text here.
== Header == Text here. [edit] ---
When does a section-edit link mean editing only that section and when does it mean editing everything below that section up until the next section of the same level? This is a bit of a tricky concept to understand, but if you examine the semantics of our markup with how section-editing currently behaves and exists, you can see the possible discrepancy in behavior. Part of the reason we don't have an edit link for the top section in MediaWiki core relates to this problem.
moving the section links back over is probably more "cognitive load" than users are willing to deal with
I don't know what this means, do you mean the edit links on the right vs to the right of the section headers? I do think having them in a fixed location is a good idea but right aligned vs left will be something to test and get feedback on
It used to be something like:
Header [edit]
Now it's:
Header [edit]
Perhaps one day it'll be a pencil icon instead of "[edit]". But each change adds some cognitive load for current users to adjust their behavior. We need to be mindful of this and try to ensure some level of stability in the design.
MZMcBride