Talk:Flow/Table of Contents spec

Comments by Hhhippo

I assume it's ok to comment here, and that at least Quiddity and Danny will notice. The concept looks good. Not everything one could dream of, and probably not even everything we need on the long run, but a step in the right direction. Here's some brainstorming inspired by the Questions section:

• Mobile?

Yes, this looks pretty much designed for mobile use, can we also have a desktop version? ;-) Seriously, why not make use of the empty space to the right, at least as an option (activated either by user preference or by detecting a wide enough browser window). Having the actual discussion at center stage and various navigation tools around it, with a permanently open TOC taking the rightmost column sounds like a pattern from a design textbook to me. The current emptyness on the right looks very much like a blocked advertisement, especially since it stays there even when resizing the browser window.

• [still about mobile] Do we have the floating ToC bar as you scroll down?

That would probably be ok, since on many mobile devices there's a lot of vertical space compared to horizontal. Again, one could change behavior depending on screen size (or number of lines at the current zoom level), and/or allow the user to minimize the TOC bar to a TOC icon by a hoizontal swipe.

• Monobook?

Yes, please! :-) People testing it now are likely to be somewhat power-users and those are likely to use MonoBook. If that requires some under-the-hood cleanup of MonoBook first, so be it.

• No-JS?

Will be needed at some point, in some form. Could be easier with the TOC in it's own column. Just putting the full TOC at the top will be OK, but only as long as it's not too long, which will happen eventually.

• Do we know the number of topics?

Sounds like a rather cheap query. If not, it could be cached.

• What is the limit of the number of titles that we load? When it gets beyond (let's say) 1,000, do we need to have a "lazy load" in the ToC? Would anybody actually scroll through 1,000 items anyway?

How about a structured TOC for a structured discussion system?

• When the ToC panel is open, can you scroll the page behind it? What happens in the ToC if you do?

If you can actually see the page (because the TOC is short enough or conveniently placed to the right of the discussion ;-), then it makes sense to be able to scroll it. The TOC should scroll along when scrolling the page, but not the other way around. The topic(s) currently visible on the page should be bolded in the TOC.

(Note that the 'bold' pattern has several meanings wikimedians are used to. The most relevant ones here are "where I am now" and "something new I didn't see yet". These would both make sense in a TOC. I'd suggest to use boldface TOC entries for "where I am now" and the also known green bullets for marking new topics in the TOC.

• Sub-sections/sub-headers? (notes at https://trello.com/c/b1yETj6R/ )

Something along those lines would be nice to have. They should probably be different from ordinary posts in two ways: (1) they could display less metadata (no author, timestamp and "thank" link, only "reply" and "...", the latter revealing the author in the history) and (2) they could be recognized and displayed by the TOC.

• Numbering? (For users using the "New topics" sort-order, it's useful to be able to count "the number of new topics since I last looked at this board". Eg. If I post a question at Help:Foo, and when I come back one day later I see that 25 topics have been posted since then, I gain an understanding of how active the page is.)

I'm not convinced we should number them. Topics can be sorted in different ways, and having their numbers either change or even being in a weird order would be confusing. A good place to display the number of new topics might be a legend at the top of the TOC box that also explains what the green bullets mean, and offers links to jump to the next/previous one of the new topics: "* 25 new topics (next | prev)". And while we're at it, maybe the same for yellow bullets marking updated topics?

Feel free to reply under each point if that seems convenient; we can assume everything on the one-colon level was my original post or make a few more copies of my signature. And then we start thinking about a split-a-post feature for Flow... — HHHIPPO 22:14, 6 October 2014 (UTC)