[MartinManey]

[Martin Maney]

On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 04:33:39PM -0800, Simon Michael wrote:
> When using the wiki with the default plone skin, yes indeed it comes 
> from plone, probably plone.css, though I can't quite see how.

I started to try to track just the paragraph font size through that
mess of CSS but never made it out the other side.  :-(

> The small/normal/large text links at top right of the plone skin can 
> adjust this for you and remember it. I see an ugly transition in firefox 
> when I use these, though.

I see little or no difference between small and normal - probably
they're both enough smaller than my chosen default that they're below
the minimum size limit.  Large makes it rather too large - nothing
fits well, and what does fit is annoyingly oversized.  I love pages
with so much content that they needs scrolling, but when not terribly
long paragraphs need it, that's a problem.  (I may be exaggerating a
bit, but between the wasted space for the navigation column and the
really really big font size, it's just too, too big).

I'm guessing that there's a really big difference here - Large must be
30% bigger than Normal, maybe more?

> You could suggest on ubuntu-doc that the default plone font size be 
> enlarged. If there's consensus, it's easy to do, in plone setup, though 
> if enlarged too much plone layout glitches may result.
> 
> >FWIW, the Zwiki "skin" made things nearly usable - I could then disable
> >CSS and get a tolerably usable display with readable text.  However,
> > 
> >
> The only font size issue I can see with the zwiki skin is it shrinks 
> them all a notch: body {font-size: 90%}. Is this what's driving you to 
> disable CSS ?

I think you may have hit on part of it up above - probably I tried
cranking the font scaling up on the default Plone-styled page, and had
glitches by the time I got it large enough.  After that I may have
abandoned using scaling to make things readable, which would be the
point where I found that Zwiki mode was usable with CSS disabled.  From
what I saw earlier this evening when I went back and checked my
recollections, Zwiki with 110% scaling is okay.  It's definitely not
ideal, though, since Olde Galeon tends to remember per-site scaling but
frequently doesn't apply it when first loading a page into any new tab
or window (and I nearly always open a new tab when hitting a bookmark
to visit a site I frequent); and I'm not sure Firefox or New Galeon
have even that much automation.  At least one of them has the sizing
hidden away in a menu, IIRC, though perhaps it can be duplicated
somewhere more accessible.  I was just messing around with customizing
Firefox's toolbars the other day, and it seems much saner (ie, no, or
at least less, stupid limitations) than other browsers I've gotten to
know.

But, Simon, why do you (intentionally, I assume) set the body text to a
size different from the audience's chosen default?  You (and Sagans of
other web developers, in particular 101% of all blogs I've ever seen)
seem to assume that we're all so stupid as to set it wrongly, which
makes no sense to me at all, at all.  :-/

> >this wasn't a useful solution for doing further work on editing the
> >wiki, as there's a lot of it that needs more than simple paragraphs as
> >its structure.  And it made the non-wiki parts of the Ubuntu site look
> >quite awful, as those pages seem to use only CSS for layout of their
> >component parts, so it's not really a fix.
> > 
> >
> Yes, you shouldn't need to be disabling CSS. I don't understand yet 
> what's stopping you editing the wiki though.

Well, that was a multi-facteted, situational thing.  Not being able to
read the page as it would presumably be viewed by most others (without
accepting unreasonable eyestrain and/or annoyance as the cost) was a
part of it.  Other parts were the way this was done without any
apparent interest in finding out what any of us mere volunteers thought
about it, but possibly the biggest part of it was that I was really
spending 'way too much time on Ubuntu, between the mailing list, the
wiki, and messing about with it.  But the change and the issues with
the new wiki were definitely the triggers as well as part of the cause.

Speaking of issues with the new wiki, the online help for editing left
me massively underwhelmed.  I never did dig too hard, but when the
advice offerred on the rather wordy and diffuse edit help page comes
down to "just imitate what you see and don't worry about features you
don't know about"... well, I think that was the point at which I first
entertained the idea that the new wiki really sucked.  :-(

> It's an understandable position, for sure. What's wrong with zwiki's 
> page history - the fact that it's not permanent ? Indeed, it's lost 

Where is it?  All I see is a previous-version diff, and IIRC even
that's hiding in a link that appears to be the date of the change. 
<goes and pokes around some>  Yeah, that's the only history I can see
(I'm using the Zwiki view because it sucks less - if it weren't afraid
of the left side of the window it would be even less bad, IMO.  Of
course I'm always interested, on a useful site, in content before
appearance.  I don't discount the latter, but when artsy-fartsy design
takes precedence over content or usability (which is 90% readbility on
contentful pages)... well, "I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with
it.")

Ah, there's a restricted view of page history that only seems to be
available in Plone-mode.  No attribution, no context, no wrapping of
long lines...  I'm afraid it looks like Spinach.

[BTW, I keep saying "spinach" because that's what it was in the
original (wasn't that a Gahan Wilson cartoon?).  While I'm not a huge
fan of that green leafy vegetable, I like it just fine in several
settings, espeically a good saag paneer.  If I had been writing it I
might have had the kid say it's Brussel Sprouts.  De gustibus...]

> whenever the zope admin packs the database, but in that's infrequent and 
> I've found it good enough for undoing damage etc.

I have to admit that I haven't *needed* the deeper history very often. 
It's like an emergency recovery disk in that respect: most of the time
you don't need it, but when you do need it you need it badly.  I do
like the view it gives you of who's been working on a page even when I
don't need the diffs - the only history I've found in this
implementation is usless for that.

-- 
There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a
well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured,
on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him
to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart,
and always to plead it successfully.  -- Anthony Trollope