Why not have the toolbar fixed at the top of the screen directly under the browser toolbar
At least as an option via config.
The problem right now is that we need to scroll if the toolbar of the FCKeditor is not visible. This is bad for a toolbar.
Every word processor has a fixed toolbar. Most users will find this useful. We can do this by using
form#editor { top: 0px; left: 0px; position:fixed }in CSS. This could eventually work right out of the box. So this could be made with some small fixes in the default 'modern' theme. Everybody is invited to play with it with EditCSS.
Discussion
- such "fixed" items can make problems if your screen is not of the size the CSS designed might have expected. Maybe not in this case, but in general this can be an issue (I tried one time fixing the leftsidebar stuff and immediately revoked it due to usability issues).
- did you check how the different browsers support this? Mozilla / FF / IE / Opera / Konqueror / Safari / ...
I did not check, yet. 2 years ago khtml (konqueror and Safari) could not handle it. I will begin testing in Firefox. -> just tested with CSS: for a start it looks ok in Firefox. it now overwrites the message, which is not so good, but one could handle this issue somehow.
- how do you want to arrange it? fix the complete header area? fix toolbar above header area and don't fix header area?
I would like to only fix the area where the toolbar is defined. Maybe this would mean to also fiddle around the HTML, but right now I just would like to see what some simple CSS will do. If this looks good, and I will try in Konqueror and IE (with Wine certainly
) how this looks. If this looks promising we may go forward. If this really works it could be really nice. A very simple example can be seen of an old page I have made at: http://www.kum-nye.de/literat.php (I mean just the top navigation)
- I think from the user experience it is fine the way it is right now. The toolbar is just on top of the editor area. Just don't make the editor display more lines than your browser window could display together with the toolbar. If you have a fixed toolbar and scroll in the browser window so that you don't see the editor area any longer would confuse me also. Or did I miss something here?
Well I think that web pages always are suboptimal when scrolling is necessary. We have to deal with it. I think this is Ok with read-only. The new edit area was created because people did not see the buttons at the bottom. Now they will not find them at the bottom but on the top, but if they scroll down the button bar disapears so they can only Save or Cancel if they scroll up again. I have found that scrolling editor windows is what people are not used to do. We must understand that many people never type in content in web except at webmailers. I think potentially a wiki can be for people that never used webmailers and are used to normale applications where toolbars never disapear. This can be very confusing. Although this style means some more complexibility and problems with some browsers i think it looks nice. I also think that maybe we should fix some more than just the toolbar. I also consider this as experimental (although this is a standard from 1996) and so it should be optional at the beginning. It is only a style thing, although we can optimize Moin for this fixed elements at some point. If we want we can also fix other things later. I think this will gibe extra functionality that makes live easier (only programmers will hate it
)
So basically, this is just a matter of changing the CSS? Marking as patched. -- TheAnarcat 2006-01-13 20:40:48
This is still unclear. In an ideal world it would just be a matter of CSS, but it depends on how good the HTML code is. Rigth now, it is just an idea and we can see how it might look with a few CSS changes. But this is not the end of the road. This has to be tested and thought through. Also I still believe it depends on changing theme handling (see my suggestions in MoinDev/ThemeDevelopment) in general in Moin. -- ThiloPfennig 2006-01-14 12:48:38