User talk:Jon Harald Søby/Dynamic menus

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Ideas[edit]

I'm really liking the concept of this skin, and I've installed it on WikiFur. One annoyance I ran into is that I overshoot the edit link and get the personal tools menu, which then forces me to move away to dismiss the menu before I can click edit. Perhaps the menu bar could go above the title div to avoid this? A smaller annoyance is the horizontal scroll bar that appears when I mosueover search in Firefox, because the shadow is outside the visible content area (perhaps it could be pushed inside it?). Still, I'm sure some of our users will adopt it even with these issues. If you do an update, let me know! GreenReaper 03:20, 29 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and one more nit - search suggestions appear underneath the search box outline - the z-order is incorrect. GreenReaper 01:14, 30 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Time for deprecation ?[edit]

First this layout is not really useful :

  • Today most computers are sold with large displays, which means that the extra width is not useful (and in fact less accessible for reability) if you widen it even more. On the opposite, taking space vertically is a wrong choice : we must save vertical space, and anything that takes space there is a bad idea. The lateral menu is then certainly better as it does not given any inconvenience to read articles (that are MORE readable with lines not taking the full width of modern large screens (with 16/9 or 16/10 ratio instead of the old 4/3 ratio that have been used for decenials on old CRT displays and TVs).
  • In addition, this required "Modern" theme does not benfit at all of the many improvements that have been made in the Vector theme.
  • The fact that it does not even work in IE7 (because it absolutely requires some tricky support of avanced CSS3 features, that are still not completely approved) is a severe blocking argument (even if you think that IE7 is broken) IE7 is far from being extinct, even if IE9 is now there (but not for all Windows users).

Really, if you want to make another version, you should :

  • think about creating a dynamic lateral menu, working in the new Vector theme, that can be minimized (it will be useful for users of 4/3 displays or on smartphones not rotated in the landscape viewing mode looking at a wiki using a generic browser instead of the specific browser adapted for mobile usage and used by default on those devices). Users of large tablets generally don't have problems : they can rotate it if needed.
  • Your layout should also be able to detect if the browser's window is in portrait or landscape mode ! Only the portrait orientation will preferably use horizontal menus (there could be two options : at the top, traditional, or at bottom, more accessible to fingers on smartphones and hand-held tablets).
  • Finally, the menu where ever it is on the screen (left, top, or bottom) should be accessible at a fixed position on screen, even if it can be partly hidden and "unrolled" on request, when the user points/taps/clicks somewhere to minimize it ; it should not scroll with the content.
  • It should work on all versions of IE7+ (possibly with some helpers in Javascript)
  • It should use CSS3 features that are well-specified, tested and approved by all 4 major browser developers (IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera). Don't forget Opera as this is the only browser that is widely implemented in the firmware of many HDTV or multimedia boxes for HDTVs. Chrome is more or less the base for the default browsers of many Android mobile devices and Safari is more or less the base for iPhones and iTabs.

For all these reasons, I think that this old Gadget shouod be deprecated (and no longer proposed by default on Commons or on Translate Wiki), because it is worse than the existing Vector skin, which is MUCH more usable as is !

Consider then creating a new Gadget proposing alternate layouts, dynamic displays, hidability, fixed position on screen and so on, based on the Vector skin and forget this one, notably because the "Modern" skin will no longer be maintained a lot and tested by MediaWiki developers (it may disappear at any time if this created incompatibilities with how HTML pages will be generated). verdy_p (talk) 20:31, 29 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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