[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] Bug#380015: mediawiki1.5: Category page 3 column tables

Dan Jacobson jidanni at jidanni.org
Wed Jul 26 16:40:08 UTC 2006


Package: mediawiki1.5
Severity: minor
Tags: upstream

[Please forward this upstream. I can only use email to report bugs.]

This is very poor design, forcing needing nodding scrolling in the
browser, that the user cannot disable without editing the page itself:

$ wwwoffle -o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_tools|grep 'td>$'
</p><table width="100%"><tr valign="top"><td>
</td>
<td>
</td>
<td>
</td>
</div></div></td>

The user is forced to read three columns across the screen, no matter
if the whole table will fit on the screen horizontally or vertically.

If his browser is not tall enough, he is locked into a PDF style view
where he must do several passes up and down, up and down to be able to
read the whole table in alphabetical order.

This violates the whole accessibility principles of HTML. You are
making device dependent expectations whereas users without such large
screens as you are forced into very frustrating up and down, up and
down scrolling to be able to read the table in alphabetical order. He
cannot just keep tapping the spacebar to scroll down like you on your
tall screens.

(True, the user could keep hitting TAB (in firefox) to have the nodding
motion done for him.)

Please use some more device independent method. Yours falls apart upon
tables that are too tall to be viewed on one page.




More information about the Pkg-mediawiki-devel mailing list