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Sorry for bringing up formatting issues in that discussion on the n-Cafe!
I was trying to be reassuring and provide some guidance to would-be contributors. I made some suggestions that I thought would make contributors feel more comfortable (so I thought!), but apparently should have run it by the lab elf committee first :)
They are
I don't know if there can be a consensus on aesthetics, but I'm with Simon (and Todd?). Having an "s" outside the bracket leading to multi-colored words is UGLY. I really do not like to look at it at all. That is why I spent HOURS AND HOURS trying to correct the problem only to see more "s"s appear faster than I could remove them. If others PREFER having "s" outside the brackets, that would have been nice to know. I thought it was merely a bad habit that I tolerated because I was just happy to see all the new content appear. Kind of like supporting an artist friend's smoking habit because he only likes to paint while smoking and you love his paintings.
I don't think those creating "s"'s outside brackets are as vehemently opposed to having "s" inside the brackets as those who do not like them are vehemently opposed to seeing them outside. That is why I made a request to have all "s"s INSIDE. I am not worried about broken links because we will fix them. I'm not even worried about duplicate pages because when we have sufficient redirects the chance of that happening is small and when it does happen we can deal with it easily. It is easier to spot a greyed out link than it is to spot a page with an "s" outside a bracket. Once we see a greyed out link, all we need to do to fix it is add a corresponding redirect. Viola. We've fixed the problem for that instance and all future instances.
Maybe that is just me. I prefer to see problems so that we can fix them rather than having people create problems propped up with crutches that are harder to locate.
In most cases, when a contributor puts an "s" inside the bracket it will lead them to the correct page because I ALREADY put redirects on hundreds of pages. Once we have redirects on all the most popular pages, the problem will mostly disappear anyway.
Piped links are less of a problem, but I would still prefer redirects to piped links. Especially for timid new potential contributors. I'd rather they get comfortable breaking things knowing someone is there watching over the place than forcing them to learn new syntax.
A bigger issue has to do with page titles. We originally went with lower case, but that was before we had redirects. Now that we have redirects, I think that upper case looks better. If we moved things to upper case and added redirects, then all existing links would still work. Either that or beg Jacques to implement that feature request allowing us to make the displayed title different than the link name. I like that idea, but we already have a satisfactory work around now. Even then, it would require the same amount of work for us.
Sorry that I am such a stickler on formatting, but it is slightly important to me and I suspect it is at least slightly important to some would-be contributors as well. I was happy in the old days of ASCII on SPR because we knew what the rules were. Even THEN with ASCII, people could still format things poorly and would hear complaints. We developed a kind of "art of ASCII math" over the years. We used the tools available to the best of our abilities. We did care. Now we should use the new tools to the best of our ability. We should care about formatting. If we set a good example, then new would-be contributors can be more productive from the start.
It seems like the easiest thing to do about plurals and other spelling variants is simply for the entry initiator to anticipate the most likely variations and to include the appropriate redirects in the article. I always put mine at the top because I normally paste in from a text file and that keeps the redirects from getting lost in the ebb and flow of editing.
I think that this paragraph is the key difference between us, Eric:
I don't think those creating "s"'s outside brackets are as vehemently opposed to having "s" inside the brackets as those who do not like them are vehemently opposed to seeing them outside. That is why I made a request to have all "s"s INSIDE. I am not worried about broken links because we will fix them. I'm not even worried about duplicate pages because when we have sufficient redirects the chance of that happening is small and when it does happen we can deal with it easily. It is easier to spot a greyed out link than it is to spot a page with an "s" outside a bracket. Once we see a greyed out link, all we need to do to fix it is add a corresponding redirect. Viola. We've fixed the problem for that instance and all future instances.
The first sentence is, I'm sure, quite true. As far as I recall, the only person who preferred having it outside the link is Zoran, although Urs seemed to express that preference on the Café just now. Even I prefer to have it inside the link, even though I don't care very much. However, I am worried about broken links. I really don't care whether the ‘s’ is inside or outside the link (although inside is better), but broken links bother me very much. I would MUCH prefer to have to fix cosmetic issues like this than to have to fix things like links that are part of the important structure that we are building.
In the very early days, before the naming conventions were established, there were a lot of broken links, which I would fix. Once the naming conventions were established (in particular, once Urs started following them), this went way down; even now, with increased traffic, I fix fewer broken links (or maybe it just seems that way). Of course, I also have the plural redirects that you (and others) make to thank for this! They stop a lot of broken links before they get started. But most new pages don't come with redirects, and I don't want the broken links to come back.
However, I definitely agree with this sentence:
I'd rather they [new contributors] get comfortable breaking things knowing someone is there watching over the place than forcing them to learn new syntax.
It may be better not to tell new contributors to do things your way or my way, but just encourage them to do something. If more content is added, it would be worth it to me if more broken links appear. And I think that it would be worth it to you if more ugly links appear. If our disagreement is only over the secondary priority between avoiding broken links and avoiding ugly links, then we probably should try not to bother new contributors with it at all.
@ JA
I always put redirects at the bottom to keep them out of the way of people who just want to edit the content. But Instiki puts them at the top, like you, when it inserts them automatically upon renaming a page.
Hi Toby. That sounds perfectly sensible (as always!). I think the common denominator is that we need to get Urs to behave correctly :)
Regarding page titles, one big problem I see with naming pages capitalized is that it will become nearly impossible to create a page with a correct name by clicking on a questionmark. This is already true if the link is plural, but practically no links are capitalized, because they almost always occur in the middle of a sentence.
I tend to agree with Mike here. There is some usefulness and also elegance to having precisely the in-line keword hyperlinked.
One additional reason why I think so may be that (on my system?) the output of that practice just doesn't look bad to me. It looks good to me!
Finally, I admit feeling overwhelmed by the need to look even into where the little "s"s go, with so many other things to take care of...
Sounds good. Sorry for bringing it up. My memory is horrible. I was reacting to Simon's complaints and forgot we've discussed the issue at length before.
I have another tendency: I tend to imagine that in an age of automatization we can be relaxed about such issues, because it is in principle easy to let some program run through the entire database and let it work on these issues.
For instance have a program run through the database that moves "s" inside links, at the same time checks if the corresponding redirect exists and if not creates them.
I am also thinking that we should be relaxed about people's tastes about link color', link underlining, etc. Because first of all no consensus on these matters will be reached anyway (as we have seen), and second, in principle it is easy to have a simple piece of software produce from the nLab source code output of whatever form one desires.
You know, if we were still engraving our text in stone tables we should be REALLY careful about how to format it. But since times have changed since then, we can spend our energy on more worthwhile tasks. Which is a good thing, I'd say.
I tend to imagine that in an age of automatization we can be relaxed about such issues, because it is in principle easy to let some program run through the entire database and let it work on these issues.
That's all true, but I think the issue is that some people find the presentation of the nLab difficult or offputting right now.
Sure. But what can we do. What can I do? One person is put off by a green "s" the other one by a non-green "s". And that puts me off. Right now. So there. :-)
(Sorry, not a productive comment. It all leaves me clueless, to a degree. )
One thing we can do is agree on how we want things. Specify some rules and go ahead and do that automated task Urs mentioned.
I never said it made sense to me. (-:
I think the current situation regarding page-naming is fine. For the reasons I stated I prefer lowercase page names. I think the best thing to do when you make a link that doesn't work is to go add the appropriate redirect. There are however situations in which a pipelink is appropriate, where the text of the link is not suitable as a generally applicable redirect.
With regard to what links look like, I would suspect that Simon's picking on one thing that's obvious to him and not really analysing the whole design. He's indicated elsewhere that he's can't see himself contributing to the n-lab so I wouldn't concentrate too much on trying to tempt him in with "s"s inside or outside links.
I think that if we had a better overall design then things like "s"s inside or outside links wouldn't be so obvious and so wouldn't be so off-putting. So rather than tinkering with a small bit of the design, I'd rather work on a larger canvas and get that right first - hence my request for examples of good design on the cafe and on MO - before tinkering with small details.
Another thing that may be possible is to have alternate stylesheets. This might take a little tinkering under the bonnet (trans: hood), but it is theoretically possible to have a baseline stylesheet that controls the overall look of the lab, whilst having additional stylesheets controlling things like colour and how links are displayed. As an example of how this is done from the server side, consider my homepage and my links page. The difference is purely in the stylesheets.
The ultimate (?) example of what is possible with stylesheets in design is the CSS Zen Garden.
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