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Don't use tables to arrange category page content in columns
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Ho hum. Not to waste my golden keystrokes of months ago, here is

another bug that never made it. "Hope it is still valid".

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.


Version: 1.9.x
Severity: minor
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_tools

Details

Reference
bz8234

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 9:29 PM
bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-Parser.
bzimport set Reference to bz8234.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

robchur wrote:

When reporting bugs:

  • Please use a descriptive summary
  • Please set the version appropriately; if a problem appears on a Wikimedia web

site, select the bleeding-edge

When CSS3 multicolumn layout is supported by all common browsers, we'll see what
we can do.

  • This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 17595 ***