User talk:NYKevin/Sandbox

Just going to put down some notes on the VE now that I've tried it:
 * Overall it was very pleasant to work with, which surprised me. The usability team has outdone themselves.
 * Transclusion needs work. While the interface looks friendly enough, it lacks affordances.  In particular, it does not suggest parameter names.  This is really bad for  templates, which typically have a whole bunch of parameters.
 * It might help to display the doc inline under the "add a parameter" UI.
 * Also, it's annoyingly hard to work with positional parameters. When I tried creating parameters called 1 and 2, it instead made unnamed positional parameters and wrapped them in   tags.  These tags were visible in the transclusion UI upon editing again, making me concerned that saving may not be idempotent in this case.  Even if it is, the template only looked right in the editor, not on the live page.
 * Adding a cot/cob around some content worked, though it initially looked ugly in the editor. Trying to change the wrapped content after the fact forced me into a wikitext editor, but hopefully people won't be trying to do that very often anyway.
 * Someone who doesn't understand how our references system works might be confused by the process. They might try to edit the references via the references list (i.e. the  ), and that doesn't work.
 * It looks like the editor appended a, which puzzles me as there seems to be no purpose for it.  The only explanation I can think of is leftovers from the previous version, since I didn't manually blank the page before experimenting (instead, I used VE to erase everything, then directly began editing).  Certainly VE has no business playing with noinclude, since it probably won't be active in the Template namespace for quite some time, if ever.
 * The "Review your changes" button (i.e. show a diff) still uses a wikitext-based interface. I suppose we must walk before we can run.  More troublingly, it took several seconds to load; an end user might try to cancel out or even leave the page.
 * By far the most trivial complaint: Bullets and numbering are done as  instead of  ; the former looks sloppy to my eye.

These are just my impressions based on a few minutes of active use. -- N Y  Kevin   18:34, 27 June 2013 (UTC)