Hello.
I'd like to throw in my thoughts and ideas about editlinks I had some time ago. They are based on suggestions from users I'm continuously receiving:
The current style has couple disadvantages: 1. In certain cases (depending on other right floating objects on page) editlinks mingle around and sometimes stick together on one place therefore it is impossible to realize which one belongs to which header. (http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C5%BEena_N%C4%9Bmcov%C3%A1#D.C3.ADlo http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Vaidi%C5%A1ov%C3%A1 http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro#Zaj.C3.ADmavosti http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistrovstv%C3%AD_Evropy_ve_fotbale_2004#.C4.8Ce... etc. in 1024*768) 2. When using wide displays, editlinks are pretty far away from headlines and together with the situation when paragraphs are short, it may be hard to follow the line and say which editlink belongs to which header. 3. The top-right place is the less usual place to place this kind of link, therefore people may think it belongs to previous article, since bottom-right is much more usual place for this.
Now: * The current editlink style is, that it has constant size regardless the size of header. Therefore sticking the link to header on same line causes kind of odd look. * The current way of inserting of editlinks to page is against semantics (it's being inserted inside the header tag). * Since the editlink is inserted within a header, it's harder to manipulate it, if the user wants to do some customization. * There's no editlink for intro (section 0) of page. * The editlink is pretty big (has the same size as text, while eg. tabs are smaller).
So I've been playing with that regarding to what's been said above and got to some proposal how to deal with editlinks. The playground is on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Danny_B./Edit_links_comparsion and the final proposal is on http://tools.wikimedia.de/~danny_b/demos/editlinks.html , since it requires some changes in MediaWiki code which renders the page (check the xhtml source). Because it is just for demo purposes to illustrate the idea, it has been tested in Firefox and IE only and using Monobook. But there's no problem to do more testing and style setting if the idea will be well received.
Advantages of the proposal (in no specific order): * The editlink is now on the place where there are no doubts of what section it belongs to (the reliability of this can be yet higher when changing the label from "edit" to "edit the following section" or something like that) * The visual behavior is now much easier to customize, if you want to do so (you can place the editlink now pretty much wherever you want around the header using CSS only) since it's independent on header * It allows adding of editlink for page intro (section 0), which is pretty old request in Bugzilla btw. * Correct semantics of headers * More correct semantics of section anchors * No odd look caused by different font sizes on the same line
Questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.
Thanks.
Danny B.