Recently, I’ve been working on what I thought was a simple feature – changing the width of the sidebar in the CWiki wiki program. There were two ways the user could do it. First, they could set it manually in the “Preferences” page. Second, and more naturally in my opinion, they could use the mouse to drag the separator between the sidebar and the main article area to the location they wanted it.
Sometimes, a web client just needs to know what font it is using. The use cases may vary, but when you need it, you need it. In my own case, I have a tag editing component for my personal wiki. The component allows entry of any number of tags. It also changes the size of the input as the user types in the text, getting smaller when characters are deleted or larger when new characters are entered.
Update: 2018-12-15 This post substantially updates the original. The most significant changes are that the layout now works as expected - no partial success. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a wiki layout for reading. I used that project to experiment with improvements to the reading view of CWiki, a personal wiki that I am writing. I used the lessons learned in the project described in that post to make some changes to CWiki.
As many of you know, I’ve been working on a personal wiki for some time now. (See the CWiki repository.) In fact, I’m using it to write this post. It’s very comfortable for me. One of the things I have been trying to get absolutely right (for me at least) is the layout. There are really only two layouts; one is for the “reading” view, the other for the “editing” view.