Navbar font

[cesy]

Title:
Navbar font

Area:
navbar

Summary:
Navbar font should be independent of other journal style details.

Description:
One of the most useful features of the navbar is being able to hit "style: mine" or "style: light" very easily when faced with an unreadable journal. However, this is defeated when the journal style customizations have also affected the navbar, and I can't read it to find the link. Therefore I suggest that the font face, font size and font colour in the navbar should be independent of customizations made to the rest of the journal style.

Possibly they could be made customizable by the journal owner, or possibly the navbar should be entirely controlled by the reader, but either way, changing the display of the navbar should be a deliberate step rather than a side-effect of trying to change the font on the rest of your journal.

Poll #754

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
27 (75.0%)

Should be implemented with changes.
8 (22.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.8%)

Comments

[facetofcathy]

And, of course, I vote for fully owned and controlled by the reader.

[ciaan]

Yeah, the nav bar is a tool for the viewer, and it should ultimately be controlled by the viewer.

[kyrielle]

Agreed.

[archangelbeth]

I cry AMEN very loudly to this. It's a reader's tool. (I, for instance, adore that journals-I-do-not-subscribe-to have the navbar, but it goes away when I'm subscribed to a journal.)

[cheyinka]

I like the idea of making it a separate step to affect the navbar, at the very least. I don't use the navbar myself, so if I changed something in my style that affected the navbar, I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't want to make it hard for navbar-users to use it by accident.

[mordyn4]

This.

[yvi]

However, this is defeated when the journal style customizations have also affected the navbar, and I can't read it to find the link.

I didn't even know this could happen. Maybe a 'always show the navbar in my style' instead?

[snakeling]

I'm not sure it's possible, technically speaking. As long as we let people use CSS in their journal, there will be CSS affecting the nav strip. :/

[afuna]

Yeah, on the other hand, we could explicitly define a few more things for the formatting using #lj_controlstrip, so that the layout is less likely to accidentally override the settings.

(We cant stop anything completely, but we could try to minimize)

[laitaine]

I'm not entirely sure what I'm voting for by hitting "implement as is" as there are a couple of "maybe we could... or maybe we could..." and no fixed "let's do this idea"

Personally, I want my navbar to match the rest of my journal when I'm viewing my journal; I do NOT want DW to take away my prettifying options.

But I appreciate that does not make for happy fun accessibility goodness.

Isn't there already an option to view the navbar in one's own style anyway? Does that not already cover what you've suggested? And if it doesn't could that option be extended to include an option:
* force these fonts/sizes/colours on the navbar.

[cesy]

An option to force the navbar into my own style whenever I view it would solve this - I haven't seen such an option, so if you know where it is, please tell me.

I see what you mean about wanting to be able to change how your navbar looks to you on your own journal, and not losing prettifying options. A lot of it would be solved if changing how the navbar looks became a deliberate step rather than something people did by accident, but I think "force the navbar into my own style" would be better still, and wouldn't prevent you prettifying it if you wanted, just mean that I could choose to view it my way if your prettifying made it unreadable for me, so everybody wins.

[laitaine]

Ah sorry, on further digging, I don't think there is such an option, I think I was merging a number of features in my sleepy brain. Sorry! Having the option to force the navbar to appear in one's own style would be shiny.

Another option would be to have images in the navbar so it would be:

[x] view page in my style
[x] view page in style=light

Then even on pages with light grey text on a lighter grey background in stupidly-small-pt text, you still have the little icon to click (and if this is a feature you use regularly, and it sounds like it would be) you would know which button did what you wanted.

I think making it so that changing the navbar is deliberate would be a bit of a pain in the arse (it already is because you already have to set a number of settings all over again) but that's liveable with if it solves the accessibility problems. But I'm not sure it'll really solve the problems because there will still be people who figure out how to change it (it won't be *that* hard) and tutorials will pop up all over the place to help those who want to but can't figure out how. Of course, this doesn't mean that everyone on DW will rush and change their navbar and deliberately make it impossible to read, but there will still be journals every so often where you will have a problem.

I agree something needs to be done, but the best solution will work in ALL cases for those that need it and should not take functionality away from those who don't.

[(Anonymous)]

Entirely reader-controlled please!

[7rin]

While I never use the navbar, I do think it should be entirely reader controlled (though looking t the thread, that may not be possible, but if it is, then it should be).

independent but customisable

[susanreads]

I didn't know people could change what my navbar looks like on their journal, but if it's possible to change it at all, it should be under the reader's control.

There's a "Dark gray gradient"/"Light gray gradient" choice in Customize Style. I thought that was the only change available. If the font can be changed, I'd want the options to be there, where I can see what I'm doing, not buried in CSS.

[triadruid]

I voted "as-is" because the basic suggestion is to make the navbar more difficult to screw up. I agree with those in comments who emphasize that it is a *reader* tool, and should be in their control as much as possible.

Altering the CSS of the navbar so that it's distinct from anything else on the page is probably the best solution. Yes, people can still mess with it if they want to, but it's a conscious effort.

+1

[distractionary]

Also: I have no idea if there's a way to force coding across the site to recognize when a journal's style is designed with absolute positioning that interferes with the location of the navbar, and correct this – I know that there are several journals I have encountered, some with similar styles, where some of the journal's navigation links overlap with the navbar. Neither are then readable, and one of the overlapping (and therefore unusable) navbar links is "view in my style", which makes it more difficult for the reader to fix that.

I know some people, when making their styles, use absolute positioning – "this link is X pixels from the top," etc. – and that is probably the cause of the collision. If it is possible for the site to provide additional code in hosting individual journals to say something like "if the navbar is used, CSS to display the page begins X pixels below the actual start of the page," then I would want that.

I don't know if this should be a separate suggestion or not. It seems to me that these might be done at the same time with less effort than implementing them separately.