Talk:Cheat Sheet

Layout

This is a good summary! Tossing out some additional ideas that could be workable for the Mice table:

• Locations listed according to order they were introduced rather than alphabetical, ie Town of Gnawnia, Meadow, Harbour, Mountain
• Rather than an X marks the spot, shading the boxes would stand out more and be easier to view.
• Removing region names altogether since most players should be familiar by now
• Removing region names allows sorting, although I'm not sure how the long rows will fare. If shading, can consider splitting long rows back into individual cells.
• Shortening some of the names like Ronza's Travelling Shoppe -> Ronza's
• Using acronyms/nicknames for locations/mice to reduce width, ie Ab. Snow, Master - Dojo, Rav. Zombie etc.

-- Grexx 03:47, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

It's just a start (that took much of the afternoon and evening, off and on at least) and still has a way to go. My thoughts about your thoughts:

• I had considered shading the "X" boxes and held off, wanting instead to get the page at least useable if not perfect and available for public use. My biggest concern about the shading for individual boxes is the amount of code it will add to the page, which is why I didn't do it right away. Just threw something up and it adds about 4K to the page, which isn't as big a deal as I thought it might be. The overhead doesn't concern me as much as how very easy it would be for an inexperienced editor to mess it up. With the Mice table in particular, that's a BIG table and it was a bear just to get the Xs in the right spaces. I can only imagine the horror of a new editor looking at the code and trying to make sense of it now that shading has been added. LOL! At any rate, it's in place now, but feel free to revert or change it.
• I initially had the table without the regions, but I really think we need to keep them. Without them, all the locations run together even worse than they do now. As far as sorting goes, I believe each location has a list of mice, traps, etc. already on the page so if people want to see everything in the Town of Digby, for example, they can just go to that page. My vision for this page was not "what is in each location?" (which is already covered elsewhere) but rather "where can I find X item/mouse/etc.?". The alphabetical lists (IMHO) present the most logical order possible for finding "stuff" — mice, traps, etc. It's for this reason (and because of the extra space that the sorting symbol takes up in the headers) that I decided against making the tables sortable. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see it as a slippery slope — if we make the tables sortable, then maybe it wouldn't hurt to add in some pricing info, etc. I really see this as a no-frills, bare-bones page. Since I've made it a public wiki page and taken it out of my Sandbox, however, I realize that my vision may be lost. Such is life on a wiki....
• For all of the long location names like Ronza's, I intentionally did not use the "nowrap" code so that the tables would adjust to varying screen widths. (Believe me, after the Traps debacle, I'm more acutely aware of that than ever, and I've been doing and teaching web design for 15+ years.) I've resized my browser window to countless sizes and I have ensured that the table will print on a standard sheet of paper without bleeding off the right margin or having to be reduced — no mean feat with all that info! The one place I did do some abbreviating was with the mice names — dropped "Mouse" from all of them and shortened up the Students and Masters names. Didn't want to do it but didn't want the line wrapping, either. So I compromised. :-)
• Same goes for the weapons/bases tables. Those are considerably narrower than the Mice table and I don't see a need to abbreviate, which IMHO could cause confusion for newer players who don't know what a "Snob" is. Since I see this as a reference more for newer players than for veterans (for example, I can't remember the last time I cared where to buy a Forcefield weapon) I think we need to keep full/proper names listed wherever possible.

So having said all of that, I'm open to suggestions. Just can't say enough how disappointed I'd be to see this move away from a no-nonsense, no-frills "cheat sheet" of sorts.-- B.Rossow ^talk_contr 04:29, 10 February 2009 (UTC)