Much of the original reason was to revert the editing area back into being rectangular (technically simpler, but also nicer to use in general); One possibility would be to put it in the meta-bar but you get issues with bad scaling horizontally if many people edit the same blip, and all their names and avatars (plus date/time and buttons) are all along the top.
If it helps, both disqus and facebook discussions follow this pattern (avatar to the side), reddit has no avatar but name on the top bar, although it does have a left column (in this case, with an up/down voting widget). In WiaB, I can envisage more blip-level widgets filling up this space once implemented - e.g. a star for blip bookmarking, or maybe a drag-handle once blip reordering is simpler. Also, this is just my 2c from working with this UI for a while on GWave, YMMV; the per-blip render rules should be simple to configure with whatever ends up being used. On 1 June 2011 09:45, Zachary “Gamer_Z.” Yaro <zmy...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have a question related to the WIAB blip UI: I was looking through the > blip CSS to find possible improvements related to issue > 281<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WAVE-281> and > noticed for the first time that avatars essentially have their own columns > in blips (which also results in some weird margin stuff in the CSS). Is > there a reason this is done? Were/are there plans to use that column for > something, or can the styling be modified to allow blip text to just wrap > around the avatar. I ask because I want to avoid wasting space in the > UI--one of the problems with the Google Wave client. > > --Zachary “Gamer_Z.” Yaro >
