Spacing

I played around with the Antville default skins and came up with what I think is a better text layout. But since these things tend to be subjective, I thought I ask what to do. The picture on the side compares a current vanilla CVS Antville site and one with my mods. Here's a list of changes:

Site title style takes the color set for title in preferences. This was hard-coded to orange so far.
There is slightly more space between author/date, title and text. This is achieved using line-height style attributes.
line-height for normal text is is slightly streched to 120%
Distance to the "link/edit" line at the bottom is significantly reduced, but there's still an offset to the text. As far as I can tell, this is also much less susceptible to the "end of blockquote-gap"
commentcount macro takes additional "innerprefix" and "innersuffix" options which allow to add to the text within the link, so it's possible to have one unified "link (x comments)" link

Let me know what you think should get in.

i am in favor of most changes as long as they will be validated for xhtml conformance by the author.

ad line-height i remember that this can cause unwanted effects on netscape browsers. i think kris might know more about that...

Screenshots of whole pages would have helped much more with deciding this. Anyway:

perfect
If you want more space between those parts, you should increase the margin around them. A greater line height has a different effect as soon as an element spans more than one line, which can happen quickly especially with titles. I'm definitely in favour of more space between title and text body. I would also like to suggest the pedantville solution, which I find quite stylish.
Very good, increases legibility and looks better.
Excellent. Speaking of blockquotes: I always have to input them like<blockquote>this</blockquote>instead of like <blockquote>this</blockquote> to avoid generation of superfluous <br /> tags. It would be nice if the <br />s would be suppressed around blockquotes so I can enter them in the better looking way.
As long as it's possible, but not mandatory, I'm all for it.

tobi, March 14, 2003 at 9:20:10 AM CET

if you want a different blockquote style please use an appropriate style sheet class.

link

nex, March 14, 2003 at 10:53:56 PM CET

to clarify:

tobi, I absolutely don't want a different blockquote style. The problem doesn't have anything to do with style at all, it's purely about editing a story in a form.

If I was editing wiki style,
    I would input
    a blockquote
    like this.
And if I looked at the text in the
form later, the blockquote would
be very obvious.

When I'm editing HTML style, I usually <blockquote>put a blockquote between line-breaks and it still represents, together with the tags, a block of text that stands apart</blockquote>from the rest of the paragraph.

But on Antville I can't do that, because I would get superfluous <br />s and this

looks

terrible. Consequently, I have to input them<blockquote>like this</blockquote>, i.e. they potentially end up hidden in another lump of text in the form. This is just a minor, tiny issue and not much of a problem, I just mentioned it because it came to my mind. It's a little annoying because of all sites I use, Antville is the only one that does it that way.

link

after quite a bit more tweaking and making sure it validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional.

Two additional changes I forgot to mention or made afterwards:

I unified comment headers to the same format as in stories, i.e. just the user name and the date instead of "on xxx, xxx wrote".
I increased reply-comment left border from 20 to 40 pix.

Let me know if you feel bad about any of these changes!

nex, March 14, 2003 at 2:31:20 PM CET

more issues

I think these changes are all okay, but I miss feedback to my suggestions. What about the line-height vs. margin issue? (C.f. my comment above, section 2.) Maybe that should be changed.

And, talking about titles: What about making proper use of <h1> etc.? To get an impression of how the site looks on alternative user agents (PDAs, screen readers etc.), I suggest you switch off style sheets completely (e.g. by activating 'user mode' in Opera) and compare, say, project.antville to ped.antville. In the latter, titles will stand out instead of being totally buried. Another difference you'll notice is that the sans style version is no longer locked into a multiple column layout. This makes it more suitable for Lynx, small screens and viewers who change the font size. (Of course, 'small' browser just linearise tables, but if I'd done it that way, the order of elements would be screwed up, e.g. the recently modified list would be on top instead of at the bottom.) My version is also still far from perfect; one thing that's still missing are links for jumping up/down to/over the content/menu, which should be invisible in the styled version but become available on the basic browsers (that only fit a small part of a page on one screen).

link

hns, March 14, 2003 at 2:33:28 PM CET

I did

use margins (in the end). I also tried using h1/h3 for titles, but it caused weird top-borders which I couldn't control (if you put the author/date above the title on ped.ant you'll see what I mean).

link

This is a reply to hns' reply to my comment above, I just put it into a new thread so I have the width I need for my screenshot below.

So my bitching was unjustified then, sorry. However, I have no idea what you mean with 'weird top-borders'. Of course, if I just swap titles and the author/date/topic paragrph, the margins are weird, because I also have to adapt the stylesheet. For story titles, I use h2, because h1 is the title of the site. So, I have to change the top and bottom margins for both the h2s and the author paragraph:

screenshot with correct margins between titles, author/date/topic-lines and stories, thanks to good stylesheets

Of course, the right-alignment of the top line looks silly now, but the margins are exactly as they should be. Nothing weird.