Hi Sergiu,

On Jan 25, 2010, at 9:37 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:

> Hi devs,
> 
> We've been working on improving the editors (content, class, object), 
> and now I have some pretty important UI changes to commit, but not 
> everybody seems to agree with them, so I bring up a vote.
> 
> The whole improvements can be seen on
> http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Improvements/ImprovedEdit

I cannot check right now since incubator is down but Jean-Vincent has shown it 
to me 2 days ago. I'm assuming it's still roughly the same.

What I don't like:

* We're freeing horizontal space to increase vertical space (or cramping it). 
This is not logical since screens all have more width than height.
* It adds a LOT of visual clutter. Now when I read a page (from top to bottom) 
I have to see the extra fields (parent, syntax, translations, included docs, 
help, etc). That makes me think about them before even reaching the important 
part which is the content part.
* Panels were meant exactly for this use case: to move stuff that are less 
important out of the main viewport to remove distraction. We're now suggesting 
to remove the primary benefit of panels.
* It doesn't scale. Right now we have about 3 parameters: parent, syntax, 
translations. When we add more tomorrow (and we will since we'll allow other 
metadata to be edited for sure, we can imagine: hidden or not hidden doc, etc) 
we'll cramp even more the vertical space
* The advantage of either being able to have view panels or more edit space is 
not compelling enough to me in view of all the disadvantages

For me this is a huge regression in term of making XWiki usable.

There are some good ideas though but they can be implemented with panels on the 
right:
* AJAX suggest for parent field (even better if it's a dialog box in the future 
- same one as the one for creating a link in the wysiwyg editor would be great)
* AJAX add object/property

So right now I'm a strong -1 for adding any clutter to the main viewport 
(unless I am convinced of course).

Since this is going to take time and since we should already have release XE 
2.2 (and since any visual stuff takes at least 1 to 2 weeks to stabilize, fix 
introduced XHTML violations, WCAG violations, CSS issues breaking other places, 
etc), I'd also propose to postpone any change to XE 2.3M1.

Thanks
-Vincent

PS: It's really cool to look for new ideas. I just hope you haven't started 
coding it too much. It would have been better to propose it earlier so that we 
could have discussed it, not causing extra work for Marta and you.
PPS: In your mail you haven't explained why you wanted to have panelless edits. 
Could you explain?

> 
> Here are the individual voted points:
> 
> 0 Remove all panels in edit mode
> 
> 1a Parent and title above the content in wiki/wysiwyg mode
> 
> 1b The same style in edit mode as in view mode for the parent/title fields
> 
> 1c AJAX Suggest for the parent field
> 
> 2a New label for the content textarea ("Content")
> 
> 2b List of included documents after the Content label
> 
> 3a Syntax switcher in the top right corner of the content
> 
> 3b Syntax help in the top right corner of the content
> 
> 3c Syntax help and switcher only in the wiki editor
> 
> 4 Better label for the version comment
> 
> 5a Right float the Minor edit field
> 
> 5b Put the Minor edit label after the checkbox
> 
> 6 Move autosave in line with the submit buttons
> 
> 7 Introduce new AJAX-powered Add Object
> i) above the objects
> ii) bellow the objects
> 
> 8 Introduce new AJAX-powered Add Object from this class
> i) at the top of the list of existing objects
> ii) at the end of the list
> 
> 9 Move the class switcher in the top right corner
> 
> 9b Remove the class switcher
> 
> 10 Introduce new AJAX-powered Add Property
> i) at the top of the list of properties
> ii) at the end of the list
> 
> 
> I vote +1 for all of the above, except 9b (-0), and with options 7i), 
> 8ii), and 10ii)
> 
> -- 
> Sergiu Dumitriu
> http://purl.org/net/sergiu/
> _______________________________________________
> devs mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

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