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benschwarz / developers.whatwg.org

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Parsed reference asides cause visual issues and also do not indicate repeated references #50

Closed hulbert closed 13 years ago

hulbert commented 13 years ago

See 2.5 URLs for example http://developers.whatwg.org/urls.html (screenshot: http://min.ie/0fZ9Ky)

The two issues caused:

  1. This is simply an unordered list but it becomes much more visibly complex as it creates huge spaces between lines breaking vertical rhythm.
  2. [RFC3987] has already been referenced here and thus does not show in the aside multiple times, which is smart, but there's no indication that the Dürst, Suignard aside is RFC3987.

I like this idea of previewing the footnote to the right side but how it currently works out leaves much to be desired.

benschwarz commented 13 years ago

Cool. I agree—I knew this was possible when I implemented it, but decided to move on as I didn't have an answer at the time.

Any thoughts on how we should implement this?

hulbert commented 13 years ago

Short of some sort of arrow from the text to the aside reference, I'm not sure this can be pulled off. How important are these references (perhaps Hixie can weigh in on this)?

Here's a sample of making them less visually significant, combined with some cleaned up styling for lists and paragraphs in list items. I also bolded <dfn> elements to see how it'd look. http://min.ie/0HQe3C

Thoughts?

benschwarz commented 13 years ago

The references were previously kept on references.html. They were hidden and a pain in the ass to read, so I brought them inline.

Being that they're omitted for the 'handheld' version, I think we could look at some kind of user interaction / means of showing them on a click–or something.

If you decide to mock anything or get halfway with the implementation I can help with the ruby side.

Right now I'd prefer to leave them as-is until we find something that is clearly a better solution.

As for "how important are they?"—I'd try reading through the spec a bit and see if you find any of them as useful distinctions–perhaps the RFC's would be, but the "what XML is" ones wouldn't be… lets put them to use before making a call either way

benschwarz commented 13 years ago

No movement. No other queries. I'm calling it "good enough", but will reopen if someone has some thoughts.