Re: WANTED: Design for documentation (Photoshop power users!)

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Montag, 6. Oktober 2008 schrieb Robin Bannister:
> In fact, I think the TOC has too many sorts of indications at the moment.
>
> Unlike the main pane, it is not for normal reading, but for scanning:
>   eyewise, you zoom out a bit and apply a sort of filter.
> This filter gets bogged down by the underlining and the different colours.
> Scanning is slower and takes more effort.
>
> And you can no longer see the breadcrumbs at a glance.
> They are indeed italic and bold, but
>  - their unity is broken (they can differ in colour)
>  - they do not stand out (they are mottled in mottled surroundings).
>
>
> Which means I'm going against a Nielsen thing - the colouring of visited
> links. 

Hehe, that was exactly my thought, I just didn't get around to write a mail 
starting a discussion about it. My browser doesn't underline links, but the 
coloring along makes the TOC look too cluttered for my feeling.

I thought about the different pros and cons of the colors, but I think the 
pros far outweight the cons. The pros are in particular:
- -) You see which sections you have already visited, so you can either go to 
an 
already read section to re-read something or to a new section to avoid 
reading something twice

The cons are:
- -) Looks cluttered and makes the TOC harder to scan quickly
- -) distracts from the main contents

So, I'm all for setting underlining to off by default in the TOC sidebar 
(underlining while hovering is another story) and removing the visited colors 
there, too.

Cheers,
Reinhold
- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/
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