On Nov 9, 2007 9:12 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
(if it's worth saying, it's worth saying three times, right?)
Somebody famous said that "anything worth doing is worth over-doing", but it really doesn't matter as the warnings are still not conspicuous enough to be noticed.
Somehow I don't think the wiki model is working so well for user interface design. Would that we had a dedicated UI expert in charge of it.
Of course, people who actually use the UI are always in a better position to judge such things than an expert consultant. If somebody wants to hire a professional, that's fine with me, even if I do believe it to be a waste of money. I would only hope they start working on some brand new skins, rather than fucking around with the existing monobook.
Getting back to your original question, does it really have to be a button?
No, but as David said it would make the edit form look just a tiny bit more normal.
A big "cancel" link at the title level would be fine.
That sounds like it'd be obnoxious. Might add that "big links" are vulnerable to unintended clicks, which may result in a lot of lost luggage when edits are accidentally aborted, especially in notoriously crappy web browsers which refuse to cache user-entered form content for even two seconds.
Rather than discussing the visual appearance of the edit form, let's talk about practical features, like the one I see here in gmail:
Draft autosaved at 11:05 AM (1 minute ago)
Hehehe, keep dreaming maybe?
—C.W.