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.

• In case you were suggesting shading instead of Xs ... I think we need to keep the Xs because many people's web browsers don't print background colors if someone (like me, for example) wanted to print the page; they'd simply end up with a blank table.

• 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. Because it will all print in a single page width and fit in a reasonably small browser window without scrolling sideways, I don't see a need to further shorten any names ... but I won't jump off a bridge if you do. ;-)

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)

I saw the shading code. I'd say most editors will stay far away from it ;) Leaving the X in along with the colours looks good too. Its so much easier to see with shading. I'd still prefer to have the locations in introduction order since that's how I personally look at the table and most of the wiki. But just seeing the code adjustment needed. Suffice to say its good enough as is. ;)

Regarding shortening of names on any of the tables on this page, I think its reasonable to assume that players visiting this page are familiar with that aspect of the game to want to look at it in summary. Anyways the links have been included, and they could easily read up on the info if they so wanted. Also, we can reasonably expect 2 to 4 more locations within the next month or so, if the previous region design is followed. Thus we're going to have to squeeze in more columns. Which is why I'd prefer things like Ronza's Travelling Shoppe shortened to Ronza's, or even Ronza, since "Travelling" does take up more space even while it is auto-wrapped in smaller display sizes.

Anyways all in all this page is a really good idea. -- Grexx 10:01, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not married to the location order at all; I don't envy the editor who decides to change it but won't object if someone does. As for the shortened names ... maybe just deal with it if/when it proves to be an issue? At present it's fine on the 15" CRT (grrrr!!) I'm stuck with here at work — no horizontal scrolling and prints nicely. But I'm not going to throw a fit if it gets changed as long as the locations are still easily identifiable. -- B.Rossow ^talk_contr 15:26, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I just shortened some of the longer mouse names and reduced my screen resolution to 1024x768. With the shortened names alone, the table just fits on the screen without horizontal scrolling (though it really did come down to a few pixels). (Screenshot here.) If/when more areas are added, we may have to get very creative with how we list the location names, perhaps using a vertical format like this:

F u r o m a

With the current table structure, I don't see any way around cramming for space when more areas are added. If I had access to the raw server logs for the wiki, I could probably tell you what the minimum screen resolution used to view the page is and we could design accordingly, but that's not only never going to happen but would be extreme overkill even if it were possible. As much as I resist the idea on "normal" pages, it could be that this is one page where we simply acknowledge that vertical scrolling is going to happen. The only reasonable alternative I see is rotating the table 90° with mice at the top and locations in rows instead. Doing that, we could make multiple tables, each with (for example) 15 mice. In the extreme, we could just shrink font size even more, but that's not a good solution. But hey, on the bright side the page is only 12 hours old and already has more than 3,300 hits. Must be doing something right. :-) -- B.Rossow ^talk_contr 15:47, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I've seen some of the creative solutions that are used in wikipedia here. Unfortunately we don't have the image upload capability open on the wiki. I think we'll probably have to resort to shortening names even more. Afterall, there are some more locations we can squeeze width out of like Ronza's, Med. Rm., TG, Lab, Moz etc :p

And I've been watching the view count. Its great :) The page has filled the void for a quick reference list. -- Grexx 16:09, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Lack of image upload is crippling us in a number of ways, but so be it. Here's a tweak to my above code that might prove useful in combination with shortened names:

F u r o m a

A lot of underlying code, but if the goal is easy reference more than easy editing, might be worth considering. -- B.Rossow ^talk_contr 16:45, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

See if you dig this: Vertical text - VERY tight. Might be useful when more areas are added. -- B.Rossow ^talk_contr 17:01, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

That looks better than the current table actually! Possibly a bit hard to read for some. Editing wise, since its a one-time edit it should be fine. I think we can seriously consider the vertical layout when the time comes along and we still don't have access to image uploads.

On a side note, have you seen the page using Internet Explorer? I just realized its missing the border around the blank boxes in IE6 as compared to a nicely bordered table in Firefox 3.0.6. Image Comparison -- Grexx 18:30, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Leave it to Microsoft. *groan* Just fixed it with my first guess! Added "border-collapse:collapse;" to the style tag for each table. IE users are darn lucky I made a lucky guess, though, because otherwise I could have let it go indefinitely. Man, I hate MS! LOL! -- B.Rossow ^talk_contr 18:51, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I believe there is currently no evidence that suggests that the prize mice are in the Medditation Room and Pinnacle Chamber. The notion that prize mice are in all locations was said before these areas were created.