Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-131168-20150519130708/@comment-131168-20150521150258

So I'm learning more about these big changes, thought I'd share what's interesting.


 * 1) More than (merely) a scheme to screw over desktop readers, it's an attempt to unify design. So now whether you're viewing things on a small or huge device, the way text/tables/etc. fit into the content space should more or less match. This is supposed to prevent people designing things around the way they view things, then having it work awfully for people with different setups.
 * 2) I can see the positive benefits of the above point, but I still think it makes the general reading experience worse for me as a desktop user. I haven't tried them yet, but people are making solutions where you can add a bit of code to your personal CSS pages that should reinstate the older look for an individual user.
 * 3) Another big change that's not very noticeable if you're not regularly changing the size of your browser is that what they called the old "fluid" layout is gone It used to be if you decreased your size a little, the content space would decrease a little. Decrease it a lot, so would the content space--until it hit a minimum point. Well, this was against the "make things appear consistent", so now there are just a few sizes the content area will shift between as you change the size of a window. And when the content area decreases, so does the font size to try and keep things consistent.
 * 4) This has highlighted a difference in the way some of our infoboxes are set up! If you can, try adjusting the window size on a member page until you see the overall size/fonts shift. The member box itself, though, will stay the same. This is because the member infobox template has defaults of very specific font sizes and pixel widths, which are maintained regardless of what's going on on the rest of the page. Check out a single page and do the same, though, and you'll see that the size of the infobox changes along with the rest of the page. This is because its default font size is set to be a percentage of whatever "normal" is, and width is defined in terms of "em", which is relative to what it's part of. It's not until the big Wikia-wide changes that the differences between these two ways really sticks out. We'll probably want to change up the infoboxes so they behave the same way, but exactly how is still up in the air. Probably going with the percent/em way makes sense, but we're not necessarily tied to the specific sizes CD Infobox already has.