913309 - A way to make tables appear consistent

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Pages like this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/tools/Keyboard_shortcuts present a series of tables listing the same kind of things. It would be easier to read if all the tables were the same width, and each table had the same column widths (something like 40:20:20:20 in this case).

Who would use this?
===================
Writers.

What would users see?
=====================
Consistently aligned tables.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
It would be easier for users to scan the page.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
No.

Comment 1

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Thanks for filing this, Will. Is this about the redesigned pages? What about bug 913311?

Comment 2

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I confirm that this is a case that happens quite often. John: yes it is about the redesigned pages, like bug 913311 (We won't change anything like this in the current theme...)

Comment 3

[David Walsh :davidwalsh]

This seems like something the writers could/should create within their CustomCSS CSS resource.  The writers know more about their writings (i.e. how many columns the table would have, etc.) so I don't know that this is a great fit for the wiki stylesheet.  Let me know if you know what rules you'd like added.

Comment 4

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

(In reply to Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli] from comment #2)
> I confirm that this is a case that happens quite often. John: yes it is
> about the redesigned pages, like bug 913311 (We won't change anything like
> this in the current theme...)

Great! In the future, please remember to file redesign bugs as blocking bug 910513. Our current bug form strips this metadata out even when you use the guided "Add dependency" feature, but you can use the following form to make it easier.

http://mzl.la/submit-mdn-redesign-blocker

Comment 5

[David Walsh :davidwalsh]

I don't believe that this is something we can automate.  Can a writer make this work?  Maybe go into each table and set widths?  This isn't a dev thing.

Comment 6

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

davidwalsh points out that I can accomplish what I want just using "cell properties" in the editor, so I'm happy.