Wowpedia talk:Styling

Much of this is taken from WoWWiki talk:Village pump. See Schmidt's edit on that page.

The history of this discussion is available in the history of WoWWiki talk:Village pump. It was moved in one swoop (ver batim, not removing or adding any text) to this page. Then I refactored it into a manageable document. Schmidt 02:39, 22 June 2006 (EDT)

For reference, these pages look like this in Nostalgia and Monobook:

• Interface Customization as ElusiveByte edited it: nostalgia monobook
• Main Page: nostalgia monobook
• WoWWiki:Main Page Dev 3: nostalgia monobook
• WoWWiki:Templates: nostalgia monobook

The origin of this project

17 June 2006

Mikk sent Rustak (the premier admin) some CSS patches for him to upload, to make the interface easier to read.

18 June 2006

user:ElusiveByte removed formatting from Interface Customization [1] due to not looking good with Nostalgia skin. Explanation:

The proper markup is much more important than the style. I made sure the default rendering of the markup looks fine in other skins. It currently looks horrible in Nostalgia, which I use because I have a hard time reading the default skin. If you want the links to look pretty, until such time that you are willing to spend the effort to use *class* definitions from the skin stylesheets to create the desired style, no style is better. Even if you have to author the custom classes for whatever skin you use. It's you who wishes to add the "style"; you should do the work. You should not do it half-assedly then make those who use other skins suffer. Usablity is much more important that style. - ElusiveByte.

Later the explanation was restated:

Kirkburn, I did a poor job of curbing my frustration when I wrote that. I appologize to all. Just so everyone understands, I removed the custom, hard-coded colors from that page, and explained in my summary how in-line styles hurt users of other skins. When I came back later, the author of the in-line styles had reverted my change with no address to the real problem. I got frustrated and wrote what you see above. I don't see that it was all that insulting. Had I left out "half-assedly", it would have been much more professional, though.

I stand by my general statement: If you want custom colors for certain layout elements (borders, div backgrounds, etc), those colors should be defined in classes in the css file of the skin of your choice. Then, if users of other skins wish to implement your classes in the css file for their skin, they will do that work. Using inline styles for colors forces every viewer of that page, regardless of what skin they have selected, to see those colors. That is not a very friendly practice. It makes it very hard for me to read with my desired skin.

So you see, when I made the page readable for everyone (but less colorful), and the original author — [the original author was Mikk, but Tarog was the one who did it] — simply reverted my change, I took that as an offense myself. My comment originally appeared on that specific page's discussion page. Taken out of context of that discussion, yes, it sounds harsh, so I wrote all of this to explain my position. ElusiveByte 18:49, 21 June 2006 (EDT)

This was the first complaint that reached Schmidt's eyes about general formatting. He had expressed a similar concern some time back, but with no answer. [2]

21 June 2006

Schmidt got the idea to start a CSS project whereby we can assemble the code that would benefit us all and Rustak could copy it and upload it to a CSS file if he so desires, until he sets up the wiki so that we can edit it straight from the interface here. This code would take full advantage of classes and allow all other skins to port each class as desired, use the same classes, or drop classes (which would render any container classes as such as just a plain container).

The ongoing discussion was moved to this discussion page as described at the top of this page in one edit [3]. See above for the link for the edit on the other side.

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Ongoing discussion

Colored boxes

A lot of the problem is simply colors. I don't see us escaping layout parameters in templates completely, but all color info in them has to go. I suggest we set up a number of color classes, like roughly so (examples suitable for wowwiki skin, but I need to double check the actual color balances):

• .box-red { background: #301818; border: #703030 1px solid; }
• .box-blue { background: #181830; border: #283870 1px solid; }

Now, if we want bands as displayed today, we'd simply do something along the lines of

{| class="box-red" style="border-left: none; border-right: none; more layout parameters"
  stuff here along with {{makemewide}}
|}

On a sidenote I suck a little on the cooler points of CSS. Is it possible to pull multiple classes into an object without defining several elements? It _might_ be a good idea (but imo not strictly necessary) to have a class that defines e.g. margins for bands and such, in case we want to vary them over skins. (Though I can't see why right now)

--Mikk 11:20, 22 June 2006 (EDT)

Colored inline texts

You're absolutely right that colored inline texts need to be in the CSS. We're using pretty much the same colors as WoW right now, which works well in-game with its dark backgrounds, and in the WoWWiki skin, but they're pretty much unreadable with bright backgrounds. They need to be tweaked to be a LOT brighter in bright skins.

Colored inline texts

You're absolutely right that colored inline texts need to be in the CSS. We're using pretty much the same colors as WoW right now, which works well in-game with its dark backgrounds, and in the WoWWiki skin, but they're pretty much unreadable with bright backgrounds. They need to be tweaked to be a LOT brighter in bright skins. --Mikk 11:34, 22 June 2006 (EDT)