Page MenuHomePhabricator

Half-stylesheet solution botches 'Other special pages' at the bottom of Special:SpecialPages
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

If one is a sysop on one's wiki, at the bottom of
Special:Special one sees

Other special pages

  • Book sources
  • Normal special pages.
  • Restricted special pages.

But they are not links, and maybe some/all of them do not make sense to be listed here.

Maybe they look good on WikiPedia, but not elsewhere.

Or maybe they can be worded better.

E.g., I am already the sysop, how can there be something restricted that I cannot click on?


Version: 1.15.x
Severity: trivial

Details

Reference
bz17974

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 10:32 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz17974.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

(In reply to comment #0)

If one is a sysop on one's wiki, at the bottom of
Special:Special one sees

Other special pages

  • Book sources

Because Book Sources was never put in a better location. Other unsorted ones would go here too (such as extensions that never specify a section)

  • Normal special pages.
  • Restricted special pages.

But they are not links, and maybe some/all of them do not make sense to be
listed here.

They aren't supposed to be links. They're a legend indicating that bolded special pages are restricted use, and that normal-weight ones are not. Suggest INVALID, as there's nothing really to do here.

They're a legend indicating that bolded...

OK, but four out of five people would never guess that.

I would just have perhaps a different CSS on items that only appear if one is a sysop...

(In reply to comment #2)

They're a legend indicating that bolded...

OK, but four out of five people would never guess that.

With the default CSS, I think they would.

I would just have perhaps a different CSS on items that only appear if one is a
sysop...

In which case non-sysops won't see the Restricted special pages thing you're complaining about, so it's not that big a deal.

Ah, I see what you are trying to do. You are using stylesheets to make
a difference. Well, you have violated accessibility! No wonder the
page doesn't make sense for some people.
Turn off all your stylesheets and give it a test drive.
You might assume administrators never need accessible webpages, only
regular users do, but you are wrong!

Therefore, please at:

  • Normal special pages.
  • Restricted special pages* <--add an asterisk here, and after

each item that is supposed to have the special styling. You can even
make the asterisk disappear in your stylesheet, making it become your
original effect.

In fact you have blown it by combining two methods.
You have hardcoded

  • Normal special pages.
  • Restricted special page

which appear always, stylesheet or not. However they make no sense
without the stylesheet!!

What you need to do is employ HTML <strong> on all the items you
originally intended to use your stylesheet on.

That way you would achieve the effects you want and accessibility and
needn't use ugly asterisks.

Stylesheets are for prettiness. Here you have crossed the boundary and
are making information to the user depend on them too!
OK, fine. But do it cleanly if you must do it.

Do you see what I'm trying to say?
If you insist on using a stylesheet solution, then those two lines
should only _appear_ if the stylesheet is being used.
They should be in the stylesheet, not the HTML.

Better of course is not depending on stylesheets at all, but using <strong>.

In fact if the user is a sysop, say at the top of the page
"Restricted pages appear in <strong>bold</strong> font."
And use <strong> on those items.
That I believe would be even clear enough to be used on a government
website vs. just hoping the user would 'get the idea' of your two lines
at bottom, stylesheets enabled or not.

skizzerz wrote:

Because not every wiki wants to use a boldface to denote restricted special pages. Some wikis may wish to remove the difference entirely by having the links look exactly the same, so that the attention of the sysops there do not get drawn to the "restricted" pages (which, in their minds, helps prevent abuse by making the features harder to locate).

In addition, hard-coding a <strong> could prevent such modifications entirely

recommending INVALID since this argument is entirely pointless

Have you ever tried to make heads or tails of those two lines with
stylesheets turned off in your browser?

That's how serious the accessibility issue with it are.

For weeks I couldn't figure out what you were trying to express with
those two lines.

b> In addition, hard-coding a <strong> could prevent such modifications entirely

Just like you have a mechanism for turning the style on or off, you
can have a mechanism for having the page sent with the <strong>s in it
or not in it, and if not in it, then those two lines also not in it.

If accessibility is not important here, then where is it
important?

(Actually the asterisks solution mentioned above even would work on devices where <b> was not available...)

And at the bottom have "Items marked with "*" are restricted pages".

All of which will dissappear if $wgDontLetThemKnowAboutWhichPagesAreRestricted is true...

Which is more secure than stylesheets, which the user just might have his own...

(In reply to comment #6)

Because not every wiki wants to use a boldface to denote restricted special
pages. Some wikis may wish to remove the difference entirely by having the
links look exactly the same, so that the attention of the sysops there do not
get drawn to the "restricted" pages (which, in their minds, helps prevent abuse
by making the features harder to locate).

In addition, hard-coding a <strong> could prevent such modifications entirely

recommending INVALID since this argument is entirely pointless

Not really true. Adding the <strong> tags does not change the default appearance. Nor does it prevent modification of it; you can still do Common.css tweaks with ".mw-specialpagerestricted strong".

Added <strong> tags to MessagesEn in r49025 because it doesn't hurt CSS browsers and fails back nicer for text-based ones too. Decided not to use '**' or anything similar because it's ugly. Going ahead and marking as FIXED (the other issue of Special:BookSources is INVALID, as far as I'm convinced).

OK, but you forgot the most important line...
$ grep -c mw-specialpagerestricted ex.html
7
$ grep -c strong ex.html
6

OK, now they are equal. Thanks.