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Document the spacing unit & baseline for grid and components for WikimediaUI theme
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Description

Summary

From conversation on parent task in T90687#7246210 on and internal Design team component work and discussions before the base spacing values are currently undocumented.

Proposed is a 4px base as minimal spacing unit. And multipliers depending on context.

Preceding work

WikimediaUI Base is following the 4px multiplier already, OOUI has gotten closer over the years in WikimediaUI theme, but still features some exceptions.

Wikit features 0.125em as well.

Resources elsewhere:

Event Timeline

Volker_E renamed this task from Document the spacing baseline for grid and components for WikimediaUI theme to Document the spacing unit & baseline for grid and components for WikimediaUI theme.Aug 4 2021, 1:48 PM

@Sarai-WMDE One thing to get clarification on from the start is if we can circumvent another abstraction layer.
From Designer Workshop presentation on sizing units elsewhere:

image.png (492×1 px, 90 KB)

Our sizing environment is complex enough with the sizing units requirements and mixtures right now, another addition “1u” over a more simple “4px” (equivalent) would only make orientation harder from current POV.

The "1 unit" terminology was only adopted in order to illustrate and simplify the concept. I didn't mean to introduce any abstraction, at least not for now: a similar conversation should be reopened, though, in case we want to evaluate the creation of sizing, spacing and layout tokens (which I would recommend). Particularly, when trying to decide the name and the way to express the relationship between said tokens.

This has been overtaken by Codex design system development of size and spacing design tokens. And the solution found there provides actually more flexibility than a static definition of the size unit. ✨