Add an "Important" box?

MDN
#1

We currently have two main types of notice box, note and warning. These are not really adequate. We often have important notes that are more important than “oh by the way” but are not as severe as to justify being a “OMG red alert!”

I think we need an important notice box style. The existing note style should become more subdued, possibly becoming a pale green or even blue, while the current yellow color should be used for the new important style, which would have its own little icon and would be used for important notes that aren’t crisis-level stuff.

That would be incredibly useful; every day I have things where I want to put it in a box to reflect its importance but am unable to decide what kind to use because it’s somewhere in between “note” and “warning”.

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#2

You can already use the following classes (in order of ascending severity):

  1. .indicator-info: grey
  2. .indicator-version: blue
  3. .indicator-warning: yellow (used by {{SeeCompatTable}} to override the indicator colour from blue to yellow)
  4. .indicator-danger: red

Note that higher severity colours always override lower severity colours.

#3

But yeah, I do agree with this change.

You’ll have to file a bug on BMO first though, since all changes to Kuma still require a bug to be merged.

#4

Yeah, that’s true. However, as obviously has occurred to you (but I want to get into the conversation for others to consider), adding a specific important indicator box style, with its own icon, would make this easier to do and to do more consistently.

If we decide to go ahead with this (which I very much hope we do), I think we should consider simultaneously adding a tip or helpful-tip indicator box, for suggestions and advice. Things that aren’t mandatory, but can make life easier.

But whether or not a tip style box is done or not, I definitely think an important box is needed.

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#5

I’ve filed two bugs against Kuma:

  • Bug 1550597: Add an “important info” note box for doc content
  • Bug 1550602: Add a “tip” or “idea” class of note box for use in MDN content
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#6

Does anyone else have thoughts on these two ideas?

  • An “important” box, for important information that doesn’t qualify as a “warning” (since currently we tend to randomly put important but not critical information in either a note or warning)
  • A “tip” or “idea” box for suggestions such as “If you really want to make this even better, try using…” or “One way to do this is…” or whatever. Think of books that have fun or interesting little asides that aren’t important to everyone but could guide people to answers that they didn’t know they were looking for

My feeling is that we very badly need an “important” box so we can better standardize our use of the various boxes and hopefully reduce the number of warning boxes we use, as well as to tune usage of both the “note” and “warning” styles. Additionally, we can hopefully tweak the color usage to make notes less “warning” looking, because those bright yellow boxes actually draw too much attention for a simple note. My proposal is to change the color for “note” to something more like a pale green or something like that, use the yellow for “important”, and continue to use red for “warning”. That way, the colors better align with expectations and the majority of the yellow becomes a less vivid color.

As for the “idea” or “tip” box – this is not as badly needed, but I think it would be helpful to be able to move “pro tip” and “suggestion” and “think about…” information out of notes and into something even less specific to this sort of detail. These are things that aren’t directly important to the majority of readers, but may be relevant to specific readers, or might offer fun ideas for ways to improve or adapt the thing you’re reading about.

We had some discussion about “important” with only agreement so far, but the number of participants was low. We have not yet had any discussion about the “idea” box concept, and need to before a decision can be made about whether to look at implementing it.

I welcome any thoughts, either in favor or against, or proposed alternate ideas or revisions to these suggestions.

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#7

Well…

I personally am not a fan of the whole “note boxes” thing: I’m I guess a bit of a formatting minimalist. It feels silly marking stuff as Important - it’s all important, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it. To the extent that there are gradations I’d prefer to do implicitly, it by the order I write stuff in the page.

Quite often we end up on MDN with a big pile of different coloured boxes at the top of a page, and I don’t think this is a very good look. I wouldn’t want us to go towards having more of that.

But more so, I’m not convinced it’s very practical to define the kinds of subtle gradations you’re talking about here. I think almost all readers and most writers have a much simpler understanding of our content model than this assumes. That is, I doubt if readers will really understand the semantic difference between a “tip” and a “note” and an “important” box. I’m not sure I do.

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#8

Sorry for not getting to this discussion sooner.

I agree with Will here.

I also don’t think this is a particularly high priority worry of ours, compared to all the other stuff we’ve got going on. The way I see it, we’ve got two levels of box urgency - yellow for “useful side note of some kind”, and red for “this is really important, you need to look at this now”. I think having a deeper granularity to the boxes would make things more confusing.

Also, having additional page features will make migration of content to github more tricky, if/when we start to go down that route.

So I’d vote to leave it as is.

#9

Hmmm. Well, I disagree about the usefulness or granularity of these boxes, since I run into problems deciding about presentation of information that should be some form of aside or call-out box pretty much daily. I also disagree about the timing concern; I think the right time to think about adding new formats and features is before we go through a migration, not after. Being fully prepared to implement any new ideas at the outset, rather than trying to figure out how to shoehorn them in later, I always a good thing.

That said, I’ll drop it. This seemed like an obvious thing to me, and a pretty easy one to get implemented, so I wasn’t concerned about the time and energy needed to make it happen until it turned into a debate. Now it’s not something I have time for anymore, so I’ll let it go for now.

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