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How should the post revision viewers be improved?
The diff view for posts has some shortcomings. The differences between the before and after views are hard to distiguish, and the mobile version is hard to read anything at all. (I think the tag-diff is fixed now.)
If the post edit history page, suggested edits page and diff view were up for a redesign, what changes are needed? I'm asking more for specifics than for general themes, but I'd take general ideas, too.
Some ideas to consider:
- Accessibility
- Multiple diff formats (inline, word-diff, unified, side-by-side, rendered)
- Good semantic element use of
<ins>and<del> - Smaller screens
- Tags
- Title
- License change (if this is a thing you can do)
The current diff view actually makes a lot more sense when you recognize that it's doing a line-by-line analysis and highlighting the whole line as deleted or added when it changes. Since whole Markdown paragraphs are often written on a single line this over-emphasizes large sections whose inline changes are hard to see.
Make it possible to toggle between markdown source and rendered output. This is helpful for the history view but essent …
8mo ago
History page filters Such as: - Filter by revision author - Filter by revision reviewer (suggested edit) - Filte …
8mo ago
More visual distinction between the title and body boxes. They currently blend, and for novice users, it can often be ha …
8mo ago
3 answers
Make it possible to toggle between markdown source and rendered output. This is helpful for the history view but essential for reviewing suggested edits:
-
If we only had rendered output and not markdown, then it would be much harder to catch sneaky spam injections like making a
.a link. -
If we only have markdown (like now), then reviewing formatting-heavy posts, including anything with Mathjax, is daunting. I don't know how folks on our Mathematics community even manage that. We shouldn't make them work that hard.
For a post history this should be a toggle; we don't want to double the size of that page by always showing both. While there's more room on a suggested-edit page, I think it should be a toggle there too, at least for now, instead of trying to show both source and rendered output. You want both to be available when you're creating content, which is why we have the preview, but for reviewing, let's not add the extra UI and code complexity until we determine that it's needed. (And also, let's not forget about phones.)
History page filters
Such as:
- Filter by revision author
- Filter by revision reviewer (suggested edit)
- Filter that lets you select text and include all revisions that touch the selected text
- Filter by field edited or not edited; title, body, tags.
...and the ability to set multiple filters at once.
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More visual distinction between the title and body boxes. They currently blend, and for novice users, it can often be hard to understand the difference between them, or which is which if you know approximately what they are. I've been here for years, and I still find the lack of distinction annoying. This is especially noticeable for posts with quality issues, such as bad titles, little distinction between title and body, etc.
The tags box is already visually distinct enough, because its content are just tags that are clearly rendered as such. That's no argument against investigating improvements with that in mind, though.
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