[Wikipedia-l] Be bold in improving Wikipedia's ugly layout! (Richard Grevers)

[Andre Engels]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Erik Zachte wrote:

> > Huh? In IE, Tools, Internet options, click the "fonts" button
> > on the first panel: "The fonts you select here are displayed on
> > Web pages and documents which do not have a specified text font"
> > - it's generic as can be. And I have 13pt Trebuchet
> > selected in every browser.
>
> So instead of waiting till 96% of all users change browser brand, you
> want these poor people to find and change a default browser setting that
> affects all web pages just for the sake of correcting Wikipedia design
> decisions.

No. We want them to find and change it to get their favorite design. And
if they do so, we don't want to say "Well, we made another decision".
At least they have the _possibility_ to correct our decision that way.
If someone is happy with browsing using the default settings, then they
probably will be happy using Wikipedia with their default settings. If
they have changed their default settings, they probably will prefer
their own settings to ours.

> Maybe we can discard all Wikipedias except the English one, if a user
> really wants to read stuff in another language he can use Bable Fish.

Apparently you would prefer to have some HTML in the page that would
make Bable Fish give English nevertheless? The proposal is to give the
user the choice of what font to use, rather than to discard all
Wikipedias except in one specific font.

> My point: you'll have to design for the actual world, not the world as you
> would like it be.

My point: If it's not broke, don't fix it. And the user may not know
what he wants, but he's probably better at guessing it than we are.

Andre Engels