[pmwiki-users] Proposed Default Stylesheet (pmwiki.css)

[Joachim Durchholz]

H. Fox schrieb:
> Feedback is enthusiastically welcomed.

I have modified the stylesheet slightly and applied it to my site at
   http://durchholz.org/jo/debian-install/Main/Debian
Take a look and decide which of the changes you wish to incorporate into 
the stylesheet. Copy settings as you wish :-)

Changes are:

1) Settings for "#wikileft a" were removed. As you can see, the sidebar 
mixes link and non-link text freely, and having links that stand out 
only if the mouse hovers over them isn't enough.
Current colors don't look too well, so I'd be grateful for proposals.

2) Removed the 10pt fontsize settings for "textarea, pre, tt, code". 
Font sizes should be relative, so that people with poor vision can 
increase font size everywhere. (I know, relative font sizes come with 
their own sets of problems.)

3) Also removed the bold font for "h1 code, h2 code, h3 code". Bold font 
there is simply inappropriate if the heading is part <code>, part 
normal. (See the "Get and run debootstrap" heading on my site.)

4) Added
   code, pre {
     color:#007f00;
     background-color:#eeeeee;
     font-family:Lucida Console,monospace;
   }
That Lucida Console font is just to make it easier to read on a Windows 
platform.
I use @@...@@ and [@...@] to mark server responses and text to type. 
Colorcoding it makes it easier to select the right passages for 
copy&paste. (That's something I've been wanting on pmwiki.org for a long 
time. Just monospacing the text doesn't make it stand out well enough, 
at least not for me. I think this kind of outlining monospaced text is 
definitely appropriate for computer-related wikis; I'm unsure about the 
use of @@...@@ in other contexts, so I'm not sure whether this should go 
into the default skin. Since pmwiki.org is definitely computer-related, 
it may even make sense to use a different css for pmwiki.org and for the 
default skin...)
The background color is taken from the skin's background.
I currently think that having both text color and a grey background is a 
bit too much; I'm considering making the green text color much darger 
(say, #003f00), and/or lightening up the background color (e.g. #eeeeee).
I'm currently considering adding
     font-size: 95%;
or something; Lucida Console tends to look "slightly too large". I even 
thought that the line height in the monospaced stretches were too high, 
but interestingly, it's 20 pixels while the normal text has a line 
height of 21 pixels; IOW, it's just the reverse of what I had thought. 
I'm not sure what I should do - I could certainly optimize it for my 
machine, but I'm pretty sure it would look ugly on other browsers/OSes.

5) Added
   pre {
     border:1px #cccccc dashed;
     margin-left: 2em;
   }
to make [@...@] stand out even better. I'm not sure that this is a good 
idea, but I like it with a broken border. (dotted instead of dashed 
might be even better.)
I'm currently considering adding a top margin; the quoted text is too 
near to the preceding and following lines.

An additional observation:

6) The vertical margins/paddings in <ul> and/or <li> are broken. If you 
look at the side bar, you'll see that if there's a sequence of subitems, 
the item heading them has less empty space above it than below. That's 
just reverse of how it should be (if the empty space should be different 
at all - I'd prefer if line distances were all equal, but would tolerate 
slight differences).
This problem seems to be inherited from the 2.0 PmWiki stylesheet.


BTW I'm going to keep that stylesheet, unless and until you improve it 
further :-)
It's already an improvement over the current default stylesheet (which, 
in turn, was an improvement over the 1.0 stylesheet). I particularly 
like the way it now handles font sizes and vertical margins for the 
headings.

Regards,
Jo