- From: Grant, Melinda <melinda.grant@hp.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:05:12 +0000
- To: "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- CC: <www-style@w3.org>
Hi Boris, Boris said: > Melinda said: > > Well, we certainly look forward to your detailed proposal. ;-) > > The mail you replied to explicitly said that I don't see a > good solution to this, right? Other than not implementing > this module of CSS, of course... Or rather making the > user-specified headers/footers !imporant, which has the same effect. Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were advocating standardizing some kind of complicated layering or shuffling of ua/author/user content in margin boxes. I think it's great that we all care so deeply that the user gets what he or she wants. And I think the passion expressed in this thread comes from that caring... As a user, my desired use model is: 1. For the usual case, let the author control what goes in these regions of the page; this provides me with information not available through the usual browser UI for headers/footers (e.g., section numbers, the name of the collection I'm printing or the model airplane shown on the page, the date of publication... Hopefully the information most pertinent to a particular document.) 2. If I'm unhappy with the result, and for pages for which certain running content is important to me but not provided by the author, I will override the author and hope I can find a way to put what I want in the margin boxes through the browser UI. In that case, it would be great to be able to use whichever of the 16 possible margin boxes I choose. I don't want those overrides to be sticky, because my selections are document-specific. But your needs as a user are obviously different. Seems like a good time to do some UI mock-ups and real usability testing with representative users. I'm guessing the answer that would emerge is to allow the full cascade model: provide ua defaults which are replaced by any author content, which can in turn be overridden by !important user selections. Provide a switch to either remember the overrides or not, and present the opportunity to change along with a print preview. This would enable both my preferred model of use and yours, if I understand it correctly, pretty simply. But that's just my guess, and I think our individual opinions shouldn't count for much here: we need systematically collected user data to get to the best answer. ;-) Best wishes, Melinda
Received on Thursday, 15 November 2007 20:06:42 UTC