New Work Page layout?

[icactus]

Have we just begun a secret demo phase for a new work page layout? I'm seeing them sporadically today. It looks like a tabs idea to replace the TOC and i think that's great. We can quibble about the colors and style (looks like cut and paste elements from the forum design), but it's a great change.

[Carolus]

We've been discussing the idea of using tabs for the major divisions of a workpage for some time now. As you can see by looking at the page for Handel's Messiah, it's a very handy feature indeed. I note that the typeface or font has been changed and the size increased. This has created a fair number of line breaks where there were none previously. The line beneath the main file description ("Compete Score" frequently) is a very dense one, so I wonder if some space might be saved by changing the wording a bit the "Scan Quality" section. For example using "Unrated" instead of "No ratings yet" (7 characters/spaces instead of 14) and use 10/10 (2) instead of 10/10 (2 ratings). With horizontal space at a premium on that line, it gets worse every time the download count goes from 2 digits to 3, 3 to 4, etc. I like the new font. It might be more readable in smaller sizes anyway than the one used previously, which appeared to be Helvetica or something in that family.

[Eric]

it's true that I only just noticed that information usually on the bottom of the page has climbed/sneaked its way to the top, but I'm surprised there's only this one brief topic instead of a storm of discussion... what a civil group here I do think it has its quite good points though of course it will take getting used to- this goes without saying...

[daphnis]

There seems to be something wonky going on with this new change...

[KGill]

Yeah, the placement of the information at the top of the page is too far over to the left and squashes the now-returned TOC - this is a big issue in readability on pages with arrangements. Feldmahler said that he'd be looking at it again tomorrow, though, so hopefully it shouldn't last. I quite like the duplication of the composer category link (along with a couple other things) high up on the page, though - I think it improves its balance.

[homerdundas]

I'll pipe in with my impressions...
I love the idea of tabs, but I think we are loosing our 'clean' look. We now have two different tab styles on the page - the wikimedia tabs at the top and the score type tabs. I think we should imitate the wikimedia tab look, albeit much larger. We should keep bright colours (e.g. orange) for things that need highlighting. It is all beginning to look a bit garish for my taste. Do we really need big buttons for adding scores/files - they are a bit incongruous on a page where simple text links rule... Do 'add file' and 'add multiple files' need to be separate buttons?
I like the idea of composer link and genre info near the top, but unsure about the look... All-in-all though, good show!

[perlnerd666]

To some extent I agree—on the consistency thing especially. Now might be the time for that custom skin we were discussing a while ago, to make it all come together.

I think Homer is being a little bit harsh, though.

[Carolus]

One feature I can see that might be useful for both the "General Information" section and for its partial mirror at the top of the page would be to use the 'accordion' feature for the listing of individual sections of a given piece. Take a look at Prokofiev's Visions fugitives to see what I am talking about. While I like the new buttons, I thing the use of a serif face (Garamond) when all the other typography on the page is sans-serif clashes.

[imslp]

I created a field called "Movements Header" specifically to address this problem. Anything put in Movements Header will show up on top instead of the default. An accordion is possible, but using a shorter field might be simpler and look cleaner.

[imslp]

@Homer: There will be an update to the current Wikipedia skin in a few months, so the tabs at the top would go away then. I personally prefer the concept of buttons better than the plain text links, though I admit my original buttons were not the prettiest. However, people seem to have improved on it.

[pml]

One problem evident in the new CSS for the file download section of the work page is that unclicked internal links are coloured identically to bold text: there is no distinction made until a link has been visited (but then you need to hover the mouse over every possible bit of black text to know whether it is a link or not). This is a major usability issue albeit one with a trivial fix.

In my opinion the "Add File", "Add Multiple Files" buttons look ugly and the font that has been used appears both undistinguished and chunky — the anti-aliasing which has been applied to smooth the letter A glyph doesn’t prevent it looking nasty. (In short, if these are the improved versions, I dread to think what the originals must have looked like!)

My usual contrarian A$0.02 I’m afraid.

Cheers, PML

[perlnerd666]

Why don't you improve them further?

[feldmahler]

Actually, you can indeed try and see if you can make it better. There are various sites on the net that will allow you to create such buttons, though I have yet to find a good one (that doesn't charge money). The two images are here:

http://imslp.org/wiki/File:Add_File_button.png
http://imslp.org/wiki/File:Add_Multiple ... button.png

You can also create translated versions of the buttons and edit the appropriate :Message/<languagecode> page if you want.

[KGill]

I still think it would be nice to have some sort of collapsible table for the movements listing, even for the regular GI section. In an attempt to address this, I created Template:Ct, which makes it simple to create a basic-looking collapsible table (code stolen from Perlnerd's user page ). It works perfectly fine on 'normal' pages (i.e., outside of the workpage template), but when I try to use it in a field on a work page it generates a huge mess. Is there a way to tweak this so it displays correctly?

[perlnerd666]

Why, thank you.
Tables break in FTE templates, unfortunately...which is why they all go on talk pages.