On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 5:45 AM, Brion Vibber <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 8:25 PM, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> On Aug 31, 2012 11:52 PM, "Brion Vibber" <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> > * Definitely don't have "left" "right" or "center" options.
>>
>> Can you elaborate on that? The positioning of images can make a big
>> difference to how a page looks. Do you really think you can automate it in
>> a way that makes pages always look good?
>
>
> Looking at say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco the positioning
> of most photos to left or right floats seems fairly random; where both left
> and right are used it seems to be a manual hack to keep images from
> stacking on top of other images or tables, based on typical screen sizes.
>
> Would an automatic gallery layout look as good and be as usable? Honestly,
> it might; I don't see much that's meaningful about the way these images are
> laid out that would be lost by a different layout.
>
> Would it look the same exactly? No, but who cares?
>
> Should it lay out in right and left alignment? Maybe not -- maybe it should
> use horizontal space and avoid floats? Maybe it should use a dedicated
> right-side gutter (left on RTL)?
>
> Maybe we should at least think about it.
>
> It's also useful to be able to
>> know where an image is going to be displayed so you can say thing like "as
>> can be seen in the image to the right".
>>
>
> No space to left or right on mobile; safer not to rely on such positioning
> being consistently relatable.
>
> Consider also a hyperlink instead of a vague direction when referencing
> something. :)
>
> Getting images to work well on phones and tablets probably requires more
>> user control, not less. It would be useful to be able to specify whether an
>> image is vital to the article and should always be displayed or if it is
>> just there to look nice and can be skipped if there isn't much screen
>> space. (Sensible defaults are a must, of course.)
>>
>
> Indeed, distinguishing between different types of things can help -- and I
> think would help far more than any manual positioning in the majority of
> cases that aren't icons or otherwise explicitly inline in text or a table.
>
> Note that tables, infoboxes, etc have the same issues with positioning,
> floating, referencing, and whatnot. And like panoramic images, they
> sometimes don't fit on small screens well; that's another thing to think
> about.
>
> -- brion
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Illustrating the problem of manual right/left aligned thumbnails and
elements by using slightly different CSS:

http://toolserver.org/~magnus/redefined/?page=San%20Francisco

Magnus

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