[Wikipedia-l] Be bold in improving Wikipedia's ugly layout!

[Benjamin Esham]

On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 05:38  PM, Erik Zachte wrote:

> What about giving the reader more control over things like font type 
> and
> size ?
>
> This is really not so hard to do. A special page could offer choices in
> font size, style and colour.

This sounds like a great idea.  K5 does something similar, and it's 
nice to be able to select your own fonts.

> The choices would be stored in a cookie
> (ok, a small minority will not benefit from this). Settings are applied
> through javascript after the page has loaded. So, minimal overhead for
> the server, it just includes a static js file. Direct feedback for the
> user, click a different size and presto! view the results. These
> formatting options might be added to the preferences page.

Hmm... One of the things I've learned while designing websites is that 
you should never count on any two user's JavaScript implementations 
doing the same thing.  That's probably a cynical point of view, but 
still -- the differences between JavaScript implementations can vary 
quite a lot.  I'm not sure that's really the way to go.  (OTOH, I don't 
have any better ideas -- embedding a tiny piece of CSS in each page 
served to a registered user would be nice, but most likely way too 
server-intensive.)

-- 
Benjamin D. Esham      {      http://bdesham.net
bdesham at iname.com      }      AIM: bdesham 1 2 8