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.