Seeking Layout Feedback [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

Today's QotD entry includes a little layout change, sticking a graphic with a title attribute next to the quote. I don't know whether folks will see this as pointless, annoying visual clutter, innocuous decoration, a cute feature (see below), or a near-miss. Right now it's just a one-shot experiment; depending on feedback and how much energy + patience I have, I may make it a permanent fixture at some point, try other related ideas, or just drop it and leave my QotD entries pretty much as they've always been.

First, the gut reactions:

[Poll #1016954]

Then, if you're curious about my reason for the experiment, there's a slightly sleep-deprivation addled explanation below yesterday's QotD. But since this is rather secondary to doing the QotD itself, I wanted to check whether it turned folks off, before engaging the "ooh, tech thingie, let's tweak" sides of my readers' brains.

And no, I'm not wedded to this particular technique even if I decide to continue the general approach; and yes, I'm aware of the problem with trying to see long title strings in some browsers; so of course, brainstorming in the comments is welcome (as is discussion of why you think it's pointless/annoying/nifty/etc., if you want to give more of an answer than clicking a radio button).

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I have chosen to have large images hidden by default. (Because I really don't like side-scrolling.) Unfortunately, LiveJournal implements this via the image information, and unless you specify a size, your image will be hidden.

So, visual clutter, but visual clutter without information.

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Whoops -- I got lazy and it bit me on the tush. I've added width & height attributes to the <img> tag; let me know whether this makes it better. Thanks.

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Ah, yes, I can see it from my f-page now. Changing my answer.

I do like the alt-text feature. The graphic is reasonably mild, so I don't actively dislike it, but "Don't care" is again a bit more neutral than I really think. You see, I am not happy about informationless graphics.

(This despite using icon-driven applications all the time.)

In light of your purpose, I'm willing to permit you to do this. I'll give you a nickel to make the background transparent instead of white, though.

Oh, I thought the alt text would show up when I hovered over the image, and it does, but in Firefox it's truncated rather than line-wrapped.

To see the entire ALT text with Firefox, I had to ctl-click (1-button mouse) for properties and then resize that box to twice the width of my screen.

I had to click "properties" to get anything from that graphic, and what I got then seemed to be cut off partway through Edward's dates of birth and death. You might want to put the information in the "alt" tag as well, for that and because you may have people looking at this with text-only browsers or screen readers, and this is a place where text really is an adequate substitute, moreso than an alt tag that says "black-and-white picture of the Eiffel Tower" or "me and my sisters."

To my eye it just looked cluttered and busy, and insisted on drawing the eye away from the text - I had to work to stay on the words instead of sliding onto the graphic. I hope you don't keep it.

(And yes, my browser does trim long titles - for xkcd, I open the titles just to read them. I doubt I'm likely to do that for anyone else. But that's really secondary to me disliking the graphicsy bauble in the first place.)

If it's Firefox, there's an add-on for long titles to let it display the whole thing. :)

Thanks, but it's not.

I had to click on the graphic to get more info. And I like it more the way it was before. Where I could just read the quote and think about the quote in general and not worry about anything else. Sorry these days I like to keep things simple.

Huh.. didn't think to check for alt text--figured it was just decoration for the quote. :)

I like the little image because it helps distinguish the QOTD post from other short ones around - helpful if I'm behind and skimming to catch up.

As far as the alt text goes - meh. It doesn't read very well on my screen due to weird wraps, so I'll probably never bother to hover it. If the info was a short text description giving more info on the quote, rather than a listing of stuff that happened that day, I might read it then.

The alt-text thing is cute (here and with XKCD). If the graphic is just a carrier for that, fine; if the graphic is supposed to have independent meaning, then I suspect anything small enough to not be cluttered will be too small to see clearly.

"Don't care" doesn't quite capture this; I think the added info is nice but I'm not sure about how to implement it. Now that I know this is what you're doing I'll hover to get as much of the text as Firefox will give me; I probably won't bother to scroll through the longer ones via properties. (I don't care enough to try to search for the right extension, but if someone provides a link I'll install it.)

I thought this one relatively neutral, but my level of not/caring likely depends upon whatthe future graphics will be...

Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Seeking Layout Feedback

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