Wiki design dialog
The QuestionsPlease excuse the somewhat imbalanced tone of the following section - Rich appears to be channeling Hunter S. Thompson. Do you care about the wiki's design? No? Well then, bugger off, you bastard. Ok, so you do. So what do you think? Are the recent changes a good thing? ( wiki voices, etc.) What new features do you want? What would make your wiki experience all the more pleasant? Or annoying? Or just plain cool? Answer me, damn it!
I think getting bogged down in design issues is a great way to to lose track of the sinequanonnity of high-quality content. Some acquaintances of mine are doing a slash-based site, and devoting considerably more energy to sophisticated and thoughtful debates about what features to add or remove than to putting stuff up on the site.
I think the crucial point they're missing is that the Slashdot infrastructure was (and is) constantly scrambling to keep up with the content.
Many have wondered why HTML won out as the hypertext system to catch on over more feature-complete and nuanced systems others had devised. But its simplicity meant it could be easily implemented on any old hardware. The "worse is better" school of thought is that, if you want to gain general acceptance, its better to have something that sort of works now than something that will work perfecty eventually.
First make the painting, then worry about the frame. --Sebbo Ok, that's all very well and good (content is what it is all about, after all) but this doesn't answer the question: what new features are necessary for the content you want? Do current features (like the margin stuff) get in the way? Or is the answer simply "stop fucking with the wiki script and start writing?" — Rich One of the cool things I learned as a fratboy is that Roger's rules of order allow for four types of votes--yea, nay, abstention, and emphatic abstention. Emphatic abstention is for when the voter believes that the deliberating body shouldn't be voting on the measure at all. It's so cool that I used it whenever I had the slightest excuse. -S Drop the default color mumbo-jumb on the side. Make the default color something maximally legible (white on black or black on white) and be done with it. Having it on every page just gets in the way. How hard is it to change the voices to allow arbitrary colors? Say $ $ FF 00 00 (without the spaces) equals blue (or is it red, I can't remember) Scott Baunah 14, 1716 The original "maximally legible" scheme I had before drew complaints that it was too contrasty for comfort. I realized I couldn't please everyone, hence the color selection feature that allows you to pick whatever works for you. I agree that having it on every page is overkill, so I'll try to change that soon. It is pretty easy to add arbitrary font face markup. I decided to provide preset options instead to make sure that the voice colors all worked with each other and the "standard" foreground text color choices. I think what I'd like to do is to provide something like eight "voices" with user-configurable face markup accessible through something like the "edit links" page. That way you get (hopefully) reasonable choices by default, and then can change it on a page-by-page basis. — Rich
Previous commentary on wiki design
Testing to see if the wiki allows HTML: <i>italics</i> <b>bold</b> <h1> header one </h1>
Hrm. I'm afraid I don't like the drop in the brightness of the default text. Makes it a little harder to read to my eye. I received a complaint that the default color scheme was too contrasty for good readability.For that matter, I'm not sure why one would want to toggle the tinting of the entire page at all. Different monitors have different color temperatures. The idea is to let you select the most comfortable choice for your desktop. - R. But hey, whatever. The conversation colors are neat. --Sebbo
Well, you can easily get your preferred default text color by changing the numbers at the end of the URL currently in your browser. Just change the numbers to %23FFFFFF, or click here http://devaul.net/cgi-bin/wiki?browse=DeVaulDotNet&textcolor=%23FFFFFF
New CommentsWhat I want in a wiki: (See my WikiEngineReview at http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngineReview, which is rough and unfinished) Here I try to list the things I most want (essentials):
Nice to have:
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