[OSM-talk] How can we spread the tribal knowledge?

[Tom Hughes]

On 18/05/10 10:08, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 08:49, Tom Hughes<tom at compton.nu>  wrote:
>
>> Before you all get too carried away with this "extra tab" idea of Ævar's I
>> would just like to point out what I've said before about adding more tabs,
>> namely that we already have too many and that any attempt add more without
>> doing something about the layout is going to have a hard time getting
>> merged.
>
> Yeah, adding tabs is a pain. Mostly because the spaces the tabs take
> conflicts with the space the "Hi {{user}} ..." line takes.

Quite - it's already an issue with some languages and/or screen sizes 
and adding more tabs just makes it worse.

> I suggested (and patched it) at one point to solve that the way
> Wikipedia does, by moving them apart. That would leave ~20px less
> space for the main map. Not such a big deal if it's not *the* site
> element anymore.

That doesn't work well on netbook type screens though, where vertical 
space is at a premium.

Worse than that, whatever you do the tabs will always overflow if you 
have a particularly verbose language and/or narrow window. They are, 
basically, just asking for trouble unless you limit yourself to only 
having a very small number of them.

> It would solve our existing overflow problems, and give us space for
> small notices at the top like "Would you like to view osm.org in
> $language", or "head over to the wiki for Haiti mapping..". We might
> even be able to move the search bar up there, users like the search
> field at the top of the page. At least so Google, Wikimedia and others
> have gathered.

I don't dispute that it might be nice to move the search bar up there 
but I think we should also remove the tabs and find some other way of 
navigating between the other major elements of the site.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/