On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 8:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
On Aug 31, 2012 11:52 PM, "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com wrote:
- Definitely don't have "left" "right" or "center" options.
Can you elaborate on that? The positioning of images can make a big difference to how a page looks. Do you really think you can automate it in a way that makes pages always look good?
Looking at say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco the positioning of most photos to left or right floats seems fairly random; where both left and right are used it seems to be a manual hack to keep images from stacking on top of other images or tables, based on typical screen sizes.
Would an automatic gallery layout look as good and be as usable? Honestly, it might; I don't see much that's meaningful about the way these images are laid out that would be lost by a different layout.
Would it look the same exactly? No, but who cares?
Should it lay out in right and left alignment? Maybe not -- maybe it should use horizontal space and avoid floats? Maybe it should use a dedicated right-side gutter (left on RTL)?
Maybe we should at least think about it.
It's also useful to be able to
know where an image is going to be displayed so you can say thing like "as can be seen in the image to the right".
No space to left or right on mobile; safer not to rely on such positioning being consistently relatable.
Consider also a hyperlink instead of a vague direction when referencing something. :)
Getting images to work well on phones and tablets probably requires more
user control, not less. It would be useful to be able to specify whether an image is vital to the article and should always be displayed or if it is just there to look nice and can be skipped if there isn't much screen space. (Sensible defaults are a must, of course.)
Indeed, distinguishing between different types of things can help -- and I think would help far more than any manual positioning in the majority of cases that aren't icons or otherwise explicitly inline in text or a table.
Note that tables, infoboxes, etc have the same issues with positioning, floating, referencing, and whatnot. And like panoramic images, they sometimes don't fit on small screens well; that's another thing to think about.
-- brion