Your thoughts on styles, and over use of styles.

[nickatwork]

Hi all,
So I'm contemplating going into battle soon about chopping down our stylesheet and I was curious as to your thoughts.

More 'span' styles or less? At the moment we have styles for:
menu name
button name
screen name
tab name
mouse-click
screen section
mandatory field
drop-down list content
grid column.

To me this is overkill, but management are reluctant to change, styles for the sake of styles and its just ugly to look at and lends nothing to the reader. Things like column and tabs are written as such, the Help column etc, so why put a style on it as well. I totally see the need for some, button, screen, menu and perhaps something for text entry.
I read an article somewhere a few weeks ago suggesting that more styles leads the reader to concentrate more on what they are reading and inturn has a positive effect in them retaining what they read...


your thoughts?

Thanks.

[NorthEast]

I would definitely use styles, but would probably suggest using less than you currently have; e.g. do you need separate styles for buttons, tabs and menus?

We just use two main span styles:
- References to the user interface, i.e. anything you are told to click (or look at) on screen; such as buttons, tabs, or menus.
- References to the keyboard, i.e. anything you press; e.g. press Ctrl + S.

We don't explicitly refer to things like 'menu' or 'button'; so we might say "select File > Save, then click OK" (the > indicates it's a menu). We do refer to things like tabs and lists; e.g. "move to the Settings tab, and select Thingy from the Wotsit list".

I'd also consider the actual style properties; our styles just use a shade of grey (no colour, or bold), which means they stand out from the black text, but don't stand out too much, and are not mistaken for hyperlinks. If you use strong colours or bold, your topics can easily end up looking a bit like a christmas tree, full of formatted text competing for your attention; if the topic looks too busy and crowded, then nothing stands out and it is more likely to confuse the reader.

[Andrew]

Obviously not being able to see either your application or help, it's impossible to judge, but that seems like a lot. Like Dave Lee, we primarily use bold type to convey actions, and that's it. We're at the opposite end of the spectrum...I think it would probably be useful to expand our spans a little bit, to improve the semantic markup of our source. I'd like to perhaps have field names be their own span.

[nickatwork]

Thanks for the feedback.
Yeah we are definitly using far too many styles. I would prefer to have maybe 4 or 5 max. It's just unnecessary.

[i-tietz]

Not thinking about the TA but the user: Do you have different looks for all those styles? E.g. green and bold for mandatory field, dark red and italic for drop down list content?
Honestly: I think you will very probably have only a single-digit percentage of users who see through that scheme ... Using a lot of different formats to "emphasize" or bring a "message" across is a definite "NO-NO" in TW ...