MediaWiki talk:Common.css

Edit History

You seem confused, Green Dragon. Silverkin 15:54, 27 April 2011 (MDT)

This is a very advanced page. --Green Dragon (talk) 05:57, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

Namespaces

Ok, so... This is the document we need to edit in order to visually distinguish the SRD namespaces. Anyone got suggestions on what we want SRD to look like? My recommendations would be:

• Look official and professional. It's a transcript of the original document. It should be treated with respect as a legal document.
• Clarity above all else. Black-on-white should be the nature of the page text, even if the surrounding page looks different.
• There needs to be something that actually says "official" on the page. Not just "SRD" or "OGL", as most regular players won't know what the heck those things are. 13 year old kids understand when something is official though.

I have no idea how to edit this thing without making a huge mess, and I hesitate to touch it at all. I have literally no experience with CSS. I have the most basic grasp of html and wiki markup, and that is advanced as I have ever gotten with any type of coding, so this is well outside my comfort zone. --Kydo (talk) 03:30, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

That's great that we can distinguish pages by their namespace. Black on white would be good to get across that the SRD pages clarify Dungeons and Dragons. We could easily change the font type to the one used for 3.5e (do you know which one that is without research?)

I'm in favor of black on white. Font, I think Ariel or some other sans-serif font to make it look more "sanitary," official. --Salasay Δ 08:57, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

As a "banner" or other such disclaimer, one idea it to have a watermark image (like a horizontally cropped library view) with the header: Official: Revised System Reference Document (3.5e) page.

As soon as we reach a consensus we will try it out to see if its looks terrible or not.

For the homebrew pages a waterimage that I think would work would be a horizontally cropped tavern view with the header: Unofficial: User-generated homebrew wiki page --Green Dragon (talk) 05:57, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

Something very strange happens on this talk page where I don't see Gree Dragon's recent edits without going to 'history'. Mystical.

I've got plenty of experience dealing with CSS, so I'm happy to help implement whatever we decide on. I like the idea of making the SRD pages black 'n white, too, I'm all up for that. And I also greatly like Green Dragon's watermark/image/banner ideas - If I'm imagining them properly, anyway.

I am still a strong proponent of having {{homebrew}} on our Category:User articles, depending on how this banner thing works out. I'm still conversing with Blue Dragon (and researching for myself), if we can distinguish CSS or anything else to certain categories. --SgtLion (talk) 06:50, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

The font for the 5e SRD is a custom font under WotC trademark. Which is silly. The closest thing to it, aesthetically, is Deca Serif.

The 3.5e SRD is nolonger available for download, as WotC has failed to maintain the older parts of their website. The files must have been misplaced while they slowly shot their website in the foot. As such, I'll need to ask that someone provide a copy of it if we want to imitate its appearance.

The pages containing the original 4e SRD have also been lost thanks to WotC retardedness.

Reddit implies that there is NO PDF version of these older documents. --Kydo (talk) 12:38, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ is written in Times New Roman.

I managed to find an older website which still had the 3.5e SRD rtfs for download, and they're also all written in Times New Roman.

The 4e SRD I managed to grab seems to be written in one of the Aria Text fonts. However, the incredibly fancy one used for the titles also seems to be some custom thing, and I can't find anything quite like it.

Both Deca Serif and Aria Text are very similar to Times New Roman. (Though I think Aria Text has prettier subtleties in its kerning.) Since every single computer in the world has Times New Roman, if we want to imitate the style of a SRD document, that is the best middle-ground option from what I'm seeing. (The other two identified fonts cost money, so basically nobody's going to have them anyways) The wiki appears to be in Arial, so having a serif font for the page text on SRD pages would be subtle and striking at once- something not often said about humble TNR.

I like the idea of watermarking the SRD pages, but if we're watermarking them with text in the background, we need to be careful that the watermark is noticeable without being intrusive- we don't want to reduce the legibility of the page text.

I'm not so sure about watermarking by category though. Lots of pages say "user" but aren't actually homebrew... On the other hand, lots of main space pages aren't homebrew either... Either way, it may be necessary to do a little bit of reorganization in order to get the styles to appear correctly. Maybe navigation pages should be moved to D&D Wiki namespace just to simplify things? Then EVERYTHING in main space would be homebrew. Or would that mess things up? --Kydo (talk) 00:30, 10 October 2016 (MDT)

Huh? There are Category:User pages that aren't homebrew? I can find none of this heresy with a quick scan - What madness do you speak of?

Maybe moving Nav pages leaves only homebrew articles behind, but I find it unlikely. There are probably whole swathes of pages in the Main namespace that aren't homebrew or nav articles, and the nav articles alone sounds like an insanely large reshuffle and link editing job, nevermind whatever else is out there.

Nice job on finding out the fonts. And agreed with the watermark, if we go with that it'll need to be a good balance of transparency or somethin'.

So, for SRD formatting of all kinds, I'm gathering that we're looking at black text on white backing, appropriate font as per Kydo words, and possibly a watermark thing. Is it worth changing the, whatever you call it, whole page background, too? Obviously, this all being subject to how the finished product actually looks. --SgtLion (talk) 14:56, 10 October 2016 (MDT)

Here's just one example: CR Estimation Table (3.5e Guideline). It's not homebrew, because it isn't a houserule or content, but it is user-made, without being an integral part of the wiki like a navigation page. There's a bunch of stuff like that. --Kydo (talk) 16:44, 10 October 2016 (MDT)

What is the 4e SRD you reference?

Fonts are important, but of course making the namespaces work with the pages are most important. Kydo you seem to be implying that adding a watermark to any "Main" namespace page would be not a good idea. I think that, rather, this would make these pages understandable since the watermark would not be unattractive but rather attractive. Even guidelines, which follow WotC standards can be "showcased" as attractive pages written as "homebrew" pages. If we could reach a consensus about this it would be great. A consensus about the font family would be great too. --Green Dragon (talk) 16:53, 10 October 2016 (MDT)

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea if it's official. Apparently there is a 4e SRD, but it's just a list of words and names they won't sue you for using. That's what the PDF I found contained, and it had WotC licensing information on the cover so it seemed pretty legit. I'll link it when I have a chance to be at home without it being an insane holiday. --Kydo (talk) 17:41, 10 October 2016 (MDT)

Oh, also, no, I have nothing against adding a watermark to main space. I just think that, if we do, it should represent all of the content therein, elsewise it may be confusing. ("This says homebrew but it's a guideline...?") --Kydo (talk) 17:48, 10 October 2016 (MDT)

I agree. Can someone make a mock-up watermark, and or have a good image for the SRD watermark or the homebrew one?

I noticed that the css for the SRD pages was updated per this discussion, but then it was reverted. I think that lets start by making the changes, SgtLion if that is okay? --Green Dragon (talk) 11:28, 13 October 2016 (MDT)

I agree. If anyone has complaints about it but doesn't know this is happening, it'll show up somewhere. --Kydo (talk) 12:45, 13 October 2016 (MDT)

Oh, yeah, that's alright. I reverted the changes because a background change necessitates the need to change specific HTML tag styles, alternating table shades, changing the font to TNR makes the text too small, but then changing font size messes with the mediawiki layout, all that madness and possibly more. I didn't have enough time to sort it all out. I'll have time for this either tomorrow, or most certainly the weekend. --SgtLion (talk) 13:32, 13 October 2016 (MDT)

That looks better than I expected! What about OGL pages? Should they be given special treatment as well? --Kydo (talk) 09:15, 15 October 2016 (MDT)

I'm glad it looks aight, huzzah. It's not too hard to work with after figuring out some weird CSS things. Though I'm worried the difference isn't actually discernable enough for the casual user. Does it look alright still? Anything that should be changed?

I don't see a need to worry about OGL pages as a whole (We still can't discern CSS by category, anyhow. Though I'd still like to find a way to do that). --SgtLion (talk) 10:34, 15 October 2016 (MDT)

Nice! Can you please add File:3.5e SRD Watermark.png to the top of all the pages? The image is the same as from Caer Wyrmshold (Endhaven Supplement).

File:3.5e UA Watermark.png for UA pages (you forgot this namespace).

File:D20m MSRD Watermark.png for the MSRD, File:Pathfinder PFSRD Watermark.png for the PFSRD, and File:5e SRD Watermark.png for the 5e SRD.

What were the exact fonts called for the official SRD? I am just curious, so I can look more into them. --Green Dragon (talk) 11:39, 15 October 2016 (MDT)

Ooooi, it wasn't meee who forgot UA. Blame Blue Dragon. I don't even know if I'm allowed to find out namespace codes, but I'll have a looksie. I like the look of these images (though PFSRD and MSRD might need cleaning up for better text contrast, eventually). Where exactly do you mean by 'the top'? Behind the page title? Behind the Article/Edit/History buttons? Making a space and stickin' it between the two? Below the title? Above the buttons? --SgtLion (talk) 05:24, 16 October 2016 (MDT)

Lets first try above the title? I am not really sure, but if we try some things people will give their opinions about its placement. We still need a homebrew banner to match too. What fonts for homebrew? Background color? I'll ask BD about the UA namespace then. --Green Dragon (talk) 06:27, 16 October 2016 (MDT)

Already found and sorted the UA namespace. I'm off work at the moment, so I'll try placing the banner tomorrow. --SgtLion (talk) 15:36, 16 October 2016 (MDT)

I love watching the progression of this in my watch page and reading the edit comments. It's like watching the epic struggle between one man and some arcane puzzle set before him. (Oh, also, it all seems to look good on mobile too by the way) --Kydo (talk) 01:38, 17 October 2016 (MDT)

Hah, yeah. It feels a bit like that, too. Thanks for checking it with a mobile! I've placed the image between the title and page buttons, using cooler CSS functions than I thought possible. I've done my best to make it a responsive design, so the images and padding should all scale with window size to be friendly to mobile users and different screen sizes. (The image might underlap the page title on people with resolutions greater than 4k. But that is currently super rare, and won't cause any functionality or visibility problems anyway).

Anyway - Does this look good to people at the moment? There's further tweaking I might do if we go ahead with something like this. CSS is some crazy juju magic, but let me know if there's something I can try improve or fix. --SgtLion (talk) 01:59, 17 October 2016 (MDT)

My only problem is legibility. The "watermarks" (really, they're banners, but whatever) have a convoluted backdrop, and where the black text overlaps the darker areas, it is much harder to read. When we were talking about watermarks, I imagined something like what you'd see on deviant art or Microsoft Word when using the watermark feature. I'm fine with a banner though, I just wish it were more clear. --Kydo (talk) 02:42, 17 October 2016 (MDT)

I had thought the same about watermarks, but truth be told, I prefer this, because a watermark overlay will decrease the legibility of text, and a banner is more obvious. Agreed on the text contrast, as I said above, text contrast is certainly an issue for at least PFSRD and MSRD at the moment. --SgtLion (talk) 09:55, 17 October 2016 (MDT)

YIKES! The banner is HUGE when the SRD pages load on my work comp! Goes WAY off the page! They look fine on my phone and at home though. --Kydo (talk) 05:03, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

Damnit, does it use a browser that's not Firefox nor Chrome, or Outdated version? Or what? --SgtLion (talk) 12:33, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

Up-to-date Internet Explorer. Windows vista. --Kydo (talk) 13:17, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

It also displays the page name text on top of the watermark image. I know it's a glitch, (because it also displays the rest of the page text all over the place) but that part actually looks really cool. --Kydo (talk) 13:22, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

Huh. Aight, thanks for letting me know. What I've put in should support IE9+ at the very least, so the issue must be with the container defined elswhere in the CSS or HTML. I'll have a look. I might end ruining your really cool display, so take a screenshot for me! --SgtLion (talk) 13:26, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't simulate this problem with IE on Win10 nor Win7 If you Ctrl+Refresh on 5e SRD:System Reference Document, has it changed whatsoever? --SgtLion (talk) 13:39, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

Seems like IE9 handles this differently, based on your OS. IE9 on Vista on this site does not seem to use Browser Mode and Document Mode as IE9, because for some reason it reads this site as non-IE compliant. Thus it doesn't respect the CSS 3.0 standards. I'm testing TWO fixes here, then. UA:Variant Rules is using fix #1, PFSRD:Pathfinder System Reference Document is using fix #2, and 5e SRD:System Reference Document is using BOTH. With a Ctrl+Refresh, do any of those work for ye? Alternatively, we can get GD/BD to put a meta tag declaring the site IE9 compatible. --SgtLion (talk) 15:18, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

I would love to tell you, but I won't be back at that computer again until Friday. :/ --Kydo (talk) 17:38, 19 October 2016 (MDT)

No worries. It's not causing any problem to leave those there for the moment. I'll also look for a way to simulate this on my compy poter. The issues I think remaining on this topic are -

• Contrast issues on the banner images themselves.
• Need a banner and background colour maybe for homebrew sections.
• (and more importantly, a way to distinguish homebrew pages in code). I'll see if BD has any ideas.

--SgtLion (talk) 01:55, 20 October 2016 (MDT)

Nope. Looks exactly the same. I'll take a screenie. --Kydo (talk) 07:05, 21 October 2016 (MDT)

Ok, not EXACTLY the same. The rest of the page text is arranged correctly now. But the banner is still messed up. I like that the title text overlaps it, I just wish it fit on screen. --Kydo (talk) 07:09, 21 October 2016 (MDT)

Found out it's actually using IE 8. --Kydo (talk) 07:10, 21 October 2016 (MDT)

I think that all official content, even non-SRD things, like their nav-pages, should have a common theme. That's what people really wanted. Most people don't give a damn for SRD or OGL, they just want to know if it's "real". It makes the standard theme the de-facto homebrew theme, with official content having a different style within that. That makes less work for us, because then we don't have to make a separate homebrew theme. If we do find a way to apply a style to a category, we should consider adding one to publications, to mark those pages as being about official content as well. --Kydo (talk) 07:15, 21 October 2016 (MDT)

Thanks for that. Only IE9+ will support the CSS2 needed to put an image in and scale it by screen size. I'll probably need BD or GD to sort out a HTML container of it's own if we want to support IE8 and earlier. Alternatively, we might have luck changing the actual file size, I'll experiment with that.

Official is such a non-specific term. I get that the general public will be fine with it, but I don't actually have any idea what you're referring to when you say 'official'. I think all WotC content should have this theme, which I think this achieves. If you really mean all OGL content, well, we have (low quality) homebrew on here released under OGL, and there's plenty of low-quality publications, too. We'd need more specific criteria. --SgtLion (talk) 09:27, 21 October 2016 (MDT)

I am not aware of how to make the image scale on older versions of iE. How should I change the images to work with black text, or change the text's wording to be fully readable? --Green Dragon (talk) 12:40, 21 October 2016 (MDT)

I've not forgotten about all this, I'm just currently having an IRL crisis, and can't get my head into the right gear. I will follow this up to resolve what we wanna get done. --SgtLion (talk) 05:36, 29 October 2016 (MDT)

I assume that Kydo was referring to professionally-published OGL stuff (the kind of stuff found on the Publications List), though I disagree that it is "official." Like SgtLion said, official is a broad, kind of unclear term; for instance, is only the SRD official, or are all first-party books official as well? At any rate, I think most first-party WotC sourcebooks weren't released under the OGL, it's probably a moot point. But again, at best, I'd only consider first-party content as "official" even if the distinction is functionally pointless.

That said, I think (with respect to being a non-admin) that there should be some better visible way of distinguishing professional OGC from first-party and homebrew stuff, just because like Kydo said, people tend to view it differently (and respect professional content more than homebrew, even if it's unnecessary). I'm not entirely sure how to proceed, but I have been toying with a homebrew-like structure for labeling and organizing such stuff. GD originally suggested giving everything a namespace unique to its sourcebook, but I think that if transcription ever picked up, it'd become a confusing mess of dozens, if not hundreds, of namespaces for each sourcebook.

Anyway, back to the topic: I don't think it'd hurt to do as Kydo suggested, but IDK the specifics of it. Would it be automatically applied to pages of a specific namespace? If we put a banner over all this, what'd it say? Kydo seems to suggest something like "Official 3.5e: Transcribed Publication" but it'd also have to be put over certain publication pages (but not ALL!). Anyway, that's just my two (or three or six) cents.--GamerAim (talk) 08:04, 29 October 2016 (MDT)

I was actually more concerned by the 3.5e OGL page looking like the main wiki, and then suddenly switching to a different style when you click SRD. It's rather jarring, aesthetically. The other SRD documents don't have that problem, because the theme appears the moment you access it from the side menu. In those cases, it feels like you just entered a new "area" in the wiki, while the SRD for 3.5e feels like a "corner" of the OGL "area". I can't really describe it better than that. It's just about its aesthetic "feeling". On the other hand, you guys are right, OGL is a pretty dang broad term, and applying that template to everything that could possibly be "official" by every definition would just be going overboard. As for the publications, I'm kinda ambivalent about that. The pages are pretty clear what they're about. It was just a thought.

People are noticing and talking about these changes. It's definitely getting peoples attention. --Kydo (talk) 10:53, 29 October 2016 (MDT)

See this question I asked for helpful things I found out. It doesn't.. all make sense to me.. I think I'm going to have to pressgang Blue Dragon into talking again to get anywhere here. I'm still firmly of the opinion that we should be sorting out this homebrew template, but it still might end up having to just be a bot. --SgtLion (talk) 05:41, 12 November 2016 (MST)

So, it looks like, if you just check the source for the page as a whole, not just the wiki content, you should be able to find the information you need to give it unique style based on category? Or am I misreading that? If that is correct, then we should give a homebrew banner a serious consideration. Personally, I hate the idea of it, but apparently our critics are more concerned about homebrew being marked than anything else. I would rather tell them where to stuff their criticisms in that regard. I'm considering opening the floor for discussion of whether some of these critics actually count as our audience. It's clear that a lot of people want dandwiki to be something that it is not and was apparently never intended to be. --Kydo (talk) 06:00, 12 November 2016 (MST)

Having heard of the issue from more people that just those on reddit, I would argue that it's a widespread issue. I don't think it's so much a case that our site is something other than people want, but that we unintentionally deceive a lot of people into thinking they're reading official content when they're not, and people largely get turned off ever visiting the site because of it. Sure, you could blame the people themselves for misreading things, but actually just fixing it on our end would be a better result for everybody. It wouldn't be any meaningful detraction from our content to put in a homebrew banner anyway.

After some thought, I'm thinking the technicals of the solution will be along the lines of editing MediaWiki:Common.js to us the mw.config.get( 'wgCategories' ); functionality to retrieve the categories and edit a 'homebrew' class into the #content, so that the CSS can work from there. Or I suppose we could put the Template:Homebrew into the page with JS, possibly. I'll email BD for his input. --SgtLion (talk) 06:23, 12 November 2016 (MST)

We need to update the images now. Per User talk:Green Dragon#Homebrew vs Official Content, File:Homebrew Banner.jpg needs to be added to the Main namespace. Can you do this please? --Green Dragon (talk) 19:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

My enormous technical issues using Dandwiki at the moment are stopping me being able to test this properly. The solution should be something along the lines of what I had before I rollback-ed. The only issues are: The margin property is calibrated to 14px font-size, so the margin numbers need playing around with, and for some reason I couldn't get the banner to actually display. Both of those might be related to my own technical issues at the moment. --SgtLion (talk) 20:57, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Hooray, my brainwave worked. What I have put there definitely is not CSS 3.0 Standard Approved, but it damn well works. If I get working dandwiki again I can clean it up a bit. --SgtLion (talk) 21:58, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Really neat! Thanks again for making the banners work.

Problem: The SRD banner shows as the homebrew one right now. Edit: Maybe I just fixed this.

If a user has a concern, a categorical workaround, or a better banner then please post them here. The banners are in a complete state, but there is no reason to not improve or discuss something. --Green Dragon (talk) 09:38, 1 June 2017 (UTC)