style question - italics

[esskay]

Active fl editors, a question for you:

It seems like I'm seeing -- or maybe it's just noticing -- more long sections of text in italics on fanlore pages, especially in the "recs and reviews" type sections of fanworks pages, or in other quoted material, such as on writer style, etc.

In "Writing for the Web" stuff, I used to be taught that on-screen (prior to paper-mimicking screens like the current e-readers have), italics are noticeably harder on the eyes to read than in print, and that on webpages limiting the use of italicized text to several words or a line or two at most was important to prevent eye fatigue.

(And to try to prevent the reader losing focus on the page entirely and skimming or just clicking away. Ditto, re eye-tracking studies and page fatigue, paragraphs longer than 4-6 lines and/or too many longer paragraphs not interspersed with 1-2 line paragraphs on a page of online text.)

I know I've italicized what felt like too much text myself on fanlore quite a few times -- and I am very guilty of long sentences, paragraphs, and text -- trying to figure out what the informal house style seemed to be.

But looking at a page side-by-side where smaller parts are italicized (e.g., the words "Author's Summary:" rather than the entire summary, a few words in a review instead of all of a review) vs. a page where larger chunks of text are italicized, I notice my eyes are more willing to read all or most of the text in the fewer-italics page.

So I'm wondering (well partly, if the difference I discern is just habit (or tired eyes) of mine)
- if there's a lot of italicized text on fanlore pages because the old notions about italics and eye-fatigue in online reading have long since been rebutted by accessibility and eye-tracking research folks and I shouldn't worry about it*
- if we're italicizing a lot of text out of habit without thinking about how it affects the readability of a page
- (other options)?

And if it should be the case that most of the italicizing has happened out of habit and online readability guidelines are still in favor of fewer italics, would active editors be willing to consider reducing the amount/length of italicized text they use in new pages they create?


*If yes, I would love links to current studies!

Comments

[facetofcathy]

My two cents on this. I don't believe blockquotes, which is what we're talking about here, should ever be italicized. I understand why Fanlore doesn't have rules about this, but there are two options that don't involve the ''italics'' markup for blockquotes, and I think they should be used.

One is the html <blockquote> </blockquote> tags which will show the quoted text in whatever format is set for it in the user's skin or by a user's browser.

The other is the quote template which didn't get used much early on because it was buggy, but now it's functional. It shows a style that varies by skin, but in the default skin has a border. I personally find the border breaks the flow of the text and makes the blockquote look like an emphasized section or an aside, but that's a matter of style preference really.

Either of these is easier to read than a block of italics, which I just don't even try to look at anymore. I feel the ''italics'' markup should be reserved for in-line quotes only.

[espresso_addict]

I really dislike the default look of the quote template, and agree it interrupts the flow of text and makes the quoted section look highlighted.

The problem with blockquote is that it only really works in the absence of any images or text boxes. The indent often disappears with left-placed images and it can become very narrow with right-placed images/text boxes.

[facetofcathy]

That's certainly true, with a left floated image, the blockquote is not very visually distinct, and it's a bit bad even with right floats.

The only thing visually obvious is the different line-height.

[esskay]

Yeah, the blockquote isn't optimal. But I find the readability of indented normal text to still be far greater than that of anything more than a few lines of italicized text.

So I've been returning to a combination of wikiformatting as list items ( * ) and/or indented text ( : ), with a line of space between reviews, and of course having all quoted text in quotation marks regardless of whether it's italicized or not.

Not perfect, but more visually offset than nothing, while more readable in larger chunks than italics, and less disruptive to page layout than too many uses (more than one per page ends up giving waaaay too much whitespace) of either of the {{Quotation| templates. (The second version of the quotation template is http://fanlore.org/wiki/Template:Quotation2 btw. Still forces too much whitespace around it, but less of the very bordered look.)

[espresso_addict]

My background is more paper typography than web design, but my understanding is that use of italics for single short-to-medium paragraphs (around the length of this one) does not pose a significant readability problem. Imo, within a single paragraph, italics make it much clearer exactly which parts are quoted text, compared with use of quotation marks. Multiple paragraphs or long single paragraphs are probably more readable in a block quotation format, though that can interfere with image & text box placement.

Looking at a few of my fanlore articles, the reason I've used italics for more than one paragraph is the interference from the infobox, even in the absence of any images.

[esskay]

For a line or two within a sentence or paragraph, yes, some italics are great to help more clearly offset quotes. But I find them especially hard to read when it's multiple paragraphs of italics one after the other (like with multiple reviews for a fanwork, or multiple quoted sections in a row) or a longer paragraph of more than a handful of lines all set in italics when I'm reading on a screen.

The infobox and how it mucks with page layout stuff is also not perfect. At some point it might be really nice if there were a mediawiki-savvy web-designer who wanted to work on fanlore's page and layout templates to make them more usable and readable. But until then, I'm hoping we might be able to talk through some ways to keep pages and their content more visually appealing (or at least less tiring) to read than not with what fanlore has in terms of layout etc. now?

[morgandawn]

I could not find any reference to blockquotes (or any form of quote) on the Cheatsheet . Ditto on the advanced editing page (unless it is buried on an diff named subpage). Might help to have something there - at the very least the actual code.

[esskay]

There's info on it here: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Formatting#Indented_Text_and_Long_Quotations but that's on the more extensive Help: Formatting page, not the cheatsheet.

And I don't know about the history of fanlore, if it's as averse to giving explicit ideas about/guidance on a house style for readability the same way the AO3 has (historically, though it sounds as though that might be changing at some point?) been averse to giving explicit guidance on tagging for the ease of readers rather than having it be a, in the case of AO3, self-tagging for writers' guidanceless-because-of-philosophy thing, while in the case of fanlore if there was a similar concept I imagine it might have been a strong notion that every individual editor should create or add to pages in whatever way they individually like most without (a lot of) check-ins on non-editor usability?

But if it isn't a deeply entrenched philosophical thing to not give ideas or guidance on things that work well from a (reader) usability perspective, then maybe it'd be good to make suggested-formatting pages more explicit -- and easier to find or bookmark. Or if it has been a deeply entrenched philosophical thing, maybe it's time to revisit....

(Not that I'm advocating a Wikipedia-type level of rules and regulations and wars around telling people what the only correct way to format citations is etc. -- er, please no -- just some basic notions around "hey, if it takes the same amount of time or only a minute or two more, this style of doing things turns out to make a page easier on the eyes to read, while certain other styles of doing things may make it more likely that people won't read parts of a page you created, hint hint.")

[anotherslashfan]

I think one of the underlying ideas was to have new editors feel free to add content in a way they could manage, and have more experienced users help with layout/formatting. But maybe it's time to restructure the formatting help pages?

[tiyire]

#2, especially in the beginning before I found out I could use the * lists for quoting recs and some other tricks. In general, if it isn't on the cheatsheet I'm much less likely to find/use it. The one or two times I used the quotation template I found it unwieldy, so I kept using lists. I never thought about italics as an accessibility problem, but I'll try not to use them too much in the future.

When I started editing I was glad that there were no complicated formatting guidelines and hoped more experienced editors would just fix it if I made mistakes, and I think it should stay that way for new people. We could have accessibility guidelines somewhere, but I don't know where the best place would be so experienced editors would find them, but new people wouldn't be intimidated.

[esskay]

I don't want to have things sound too prescriptive or intimidating for new editors; that would be very counterproductive.

Hmmm, I dunno, maybe we could see if there's a good place (even on one of the "making a new page" or "new editor" oriented pages?) to say something like (but phrased better):

"Optional: If you'd like to make a new page that you're creating (or text you're adding to a page) easier for page visitors to read, you may want to consider:
- for online reading, shorter paragraphs work better than longer ones
- more than a very few lines in a row of text in italics is hard on the eyes in online reading.
If you'd like, you can use the wiki-markup for indents, line-items, the html < blockquote > tag or fanlore's Quotation templates to make quoted text stand out; see page x for more info on these options."

And then on page x (or section x of page y) add info/point to example pages where we use those, including frogspace's no-spacing tips to make the Quotation(2) template look good. Or something.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

It seems like I'm seeing -- or maybe it's just noticing -- more long sections of text in italics on fanlore pages, especially in the "recs and reviews" type sections of fanworks pages, or in other quoted material, such as on writer style, etc.

I don't use italics in the recs and reviews sections and generally try to avoid long sections of italics.

The places I most often see a wall of italic text is on the zine pages, but I guess that's a matter of practicality for the zine page editors. They add a lot of content to many, many pages and the fastest way of doing that and keeping it discinct is probably by using italics.

The white space before and after one of the two quotation templates is one of those bugs I work around by adding the template directly (no line breaks, no space) after the last line of text that comes before and start the next line of text outside the quote directly after the templation code.

[esskay]

I like how you tweaked the recs -- alternating list-item and Quotation2 -- on the Keptverse page, I might try that way too. Though I might try indent instead of list-iteming the non-boxed ones, will play around with it.

(I've got to admit, I rarely read all or much of the text on the zine pages I stumble across just because zine fandom is (still) foreign to me; I'm very boringly archive and journal-based fandom oriented so far.)