Disambiguate authorship in Site Scheme(s)

[lorem_ipsum]

Title:
Disambiguate authorship in Site Scheme(s)

Area:
styles

Summary:
When viewing a journal with ?style=site, it's difficult in some cases to figure out who the author is.

Description:
See <a href="http://elf.dreamwidth.org/2010/09/16/?style=site">this entry</a>. <user name=elf> asks people to link to the date of the entry rather than the entry's individual URL. I'm viewing the page in Tropospherical Red; I can see <user name=elf>'s icon, but not hir name.

I found similar issues when viewing:

* <a href="http://elf.dreamwidth.org/2010/?style=site">by year</a>; neither username nor icon is shown.

* <a href="http://elf.dreamwidth.org/?style=site"> recent entries</a>, ditto.

* <http://denise.dreamwidth.org/2009/01/?style=site>by month</a>; username is given twice, but so discreetly you'd think that mentioning authorship is taboo.

* <a href="http://denise.dreamwidth.org/2009/02/20/?style=site">by date</a> on a day that multiple entries were made, ditto.

...These issues are common to all combinations of journal style + site scheme that I checked (a not-thorough number of permutations of elf, me, and denise versus Tropo Red, Tropo Purple, Celerity, and Lynx).

This is especially bad in cases where a ?style=site URL might be widely circulated among people unfamiliar with LJ/DW, as in my first example.

In conclusion: For individual journals, the username should be prominent. For comms, the comm name and poster's username should be prominent.

Poll #4639 Disambiguate authorship in Site Scheme(s)

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

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
24 (66.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
11 (30.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[zing_och]

I never look for names since I'm used to thinking of the username as the person's name, but I dont' know why we shouldn't include names in case someone does use them like this.

[faithofone]

The username isn't even displayed when I view it in Celerity (or whatever the green one is).

[denise]

In this case, it's a bug -- the ?style=site on journals isn't actually the site style, it's a S2 style that's made to look like the site style, so there's still a few glitches in it.

[azurelunatic]

I see! Unglitching would be good!

[matgb]

Really?

So we've already got an S2 version of all the site schemes? In which case, is it technically possible to switch the main site pages to S2?

I'm guessing the answer's either no or so difficult it's silly, but if it were possible, it'd make the whole "I want a different colourscheme" requests a lot easier to handle.

[denise]

No, a) I think it's just Tropo Red and b) ha ha ha ha ha S2. we want to replace S2, not turn everything into it. :P

[azurelunatic]

Also purple, it looks like.

[exor674]

It works for all site schemes, it's just the body of core2 ( with a little magic to keep quickreply and titles working ) then doing a whole bunch of magic and rendering a BML page with that content ( and of course, sharing a great deal of that magic with the template toolkit backend )

( and since it's just rendering plain un-styled core2, it's uglier then a bottle of 99% pure ugly powder )

[matgb]

especially bad in cases where a ?style=site URL might be widely circulated among people unfamiliar with LJ/DW

I've ticked 'implement as is' despite this bit.

I simply do not understand why you'd want to link like that. I especially don't understand why you'd encourage people to link to you like that. If your layout is so hard to read that you don't want people to ever see it, isn't that a problem with your layout?

I hate hitting a page where someone's already chosen how I should look at it in the link I followed, I want to see the page as the author created it, including their layout whenever possible.

However, this doesn't negate the problem you've identified, so while I do think people deliberately linking in this way is just weird, having af ully functioning viewing option for those that want it is a Good Thing.

[azurelunatic]

Some people/organizations, like metafandom, have a habit of linking to stuff other people have written using a modified link (metafandom tends to use ?format=light) because of the number of people who have great stuff to say but horrible layouts, and the number of people who have special accessibility needs.

This is actually a polite linking convention in social groups that consist of mostly private individuals with small groups of close friends, where the journal owner has styled their journal to suit themselves and themselves alone, secure in the idea that most of their friends will be reading it off their reading pages anyway (where it's styled to suit them), and if any of their friends have a problem with it, their friends will be using ?style=mine or something. They're not expecting to be visited by any outsiders with any regularity. But sometimes they say something that's profound enough that it gets linked around by other people.

In the particular case of elf's entry, it's a bigass entry with lots and lots of cut stuff. I see that elf uses sitescheme for entries, so this is a clever workaround to present the entry as intended, but with cuts intact.

[matgb]

I see that [personal profile] elf uses sitescheme for entries

Yeah, see, I've never understood that either. I've put so much effort into semantically marking up all my posts and using valid CSS in my stylesheet for effect (image alignment, pullquotes, etc), I just don't want to see the site style on someone's personal pages.

where the journal owner has styled their journal to suit themselves and themselves alone

See, I want to see that. How the journal owner likes to see thing is part of the impact of a post, and it adds stuff to them. I especially want to see things like tag clouds and similar on the page, their links list and profile area.

I'm thinking there's a space for a feature to let people like me force 'always view in journal layout' when looking at post pages, that'd suit me a lot more (partially, also, because I hate widescreen columns, always have)

[lorem_ipsum]

I link to *other* people's journals like that all the time.

[matgb]

Ok, why? I, personally, really hate it, and given it's such an easy switch for people to make to whatever viewing scheme they prefer, why force something on people?

I can just about understand it's your viewing preference, but it's not everyone's, and many times, especially on posts that use properly coded classed stylings (like most of mine), the impact of the post will be partially lost.

I know it's a case of YMMv, but I really hate it when people do it, and I've never understood why it's considered a good thing to override user preferences, especially when DW has so many built in controls.

[lorem_ipsum]

Visitors who don't use LJ/DW don't even know they can choose a site scheme, never mind what to do if they can't read a journal's gray-on-pink text. Linking to format=light helps them out.

> why force something on people?

I tend to assume that people who are used to LJ/DW probably have their ways of dealing with styles/siteschemes they don't like, whether it's a Greasemonkey script, or manually removing the format=light, or whatever. (Of course, newbies don't, yet, but for them I'd rather err on the side of readability, anyway.)

It's nice that you're using good code, but I don't have time to analyze the accessibility of everything I link to. In fact, if I could link to format=light on the rest of the internet, I totally would. I have vision problems, and ever since I found out about ems (more than ten years ago) I've been pretty frustrated with browser makers (*cough*IE's past implementation of ems as pixels*cough*) and website designers who love declaring font sizes in points or pixels. ...The angst, it is strong in this one.

[matgb]

ah, usability issue, makes more sense now. Except, DW is doing the best it can to ensure it's not a problem on official styles. I know it is useful, haven't settled on the UI yet, but have a look at the footer for each of my posts on my layout, links to different formats, including light. Possibly ought to put site in there as well.