[Pmwiki-users] link icons

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Thu Jul 22 00:23:23 CDT 2004


On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 10:59:49PM -0400, Kass Lloyd wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 10:26:15 +1000, Jason Grossman
> <jason.grossman at staff.usyd.edu.au> wrote:
> > Christian Ridderstr?m <chr at home.se> wrote:
> > > I might be conservative here, but I don't really think icons are always
> > > easier to understand.
> > 
> 
> Well there has to be a solution that is friendly to the 20% of the
> white male population who is color blind, and dosn't interrupt the
> natural flow of sentences. I think any punctuation mark is a bad idea
> to inject into the middle of a sentence.

Without saying anything for or against the merits of icons or the
way PmWiki currently does things, I think I should note that the '?' 
used for creating new pages is indeed an icon of sorts -- a graphical
image representing an action -- it's just that the meaning of the '?'
isn't often unclear to many users.  But this is also true of many things
have a fancier graphical image -- I know that I never seem to be able to 
intuitively figure out the icons that MoinMoin uses and I end up
having to hover to figure out what each does (which somewhat defeats
the purpose of having an icon).

Is it necessarily true that *any* punctuation mark is bad?  How about
angle quotes, like ?this??  (These are &laquo; and &raquo;, or we could
use <<this>> for people w/o Latin-compatible fonts.)  Yes, I know they're
used as "real" punctuation in many non-English languages; OTOH, I'm not
sure that using them in this manner is entirely incorrect or disturbing
to someone reading the text.  ?this? would also give an advantage over 
'this?' as one could easily see the entire link phrase associated with 
the link (e.g., if the link phrase contains spaces).  

Other options might be &lsaquo and &rsaquo (look like '<' and '>' but 
smaller)  or  &lfloor and &rfloor.

If we do go with graphical icons--at least let's make it a standard one.  
For create page links I'm thinking it should be something like the 
"New Document" icon found in popular office packages.

So far I haven't been bundling lots of skins with PmWiki distributions -- 
leaving such things to the cookbook.  But for 2.0 I'd like to come up with a
better skin than 1.0 uses, and if there's one that makes good use of 
icons I'm not at all opposed to including/using them in the distribution.

Pm



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list