Choosing useless images to remove...

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
  • Posts: 16,079
Choosing useless images to remove...
« on April 20th, 2013, 03:35 PM »
In the last couple of years, Pete and I removed a lot of images from the theme folder, that we considered to be useless.

I'd like to centralize discussion on icons we can/could/should remove from the package.

Starting with notify.gif... This is the icon next to the 'Notify' link in /do/recent/ (list of recent posts), as well as profile contributions, and search results.

I, FWIW, never, ever, ever, ever, ever clicked that button when outside of a topic display. I don't see *any* point in offering users to ability to subscribe to a topic when they're only seeing one post of it... Usually, people will want to click the message, read it in context, and decide whether or not they click Notify on the topic page...

I think no one would ever notice it if I decided to remove that icon, and the associated link. Only the link in Display should remain, and these buttons don't use icons.
What do you think..?

ziycon

  • Posts: 126
Re: Choosing useless images to remove...
« Reply #1, on April 20th, 2013, 07:13 PM »
The less icons the better, I know such a small icon wouldn't have very much if any performance impact. But for example in Ireland we have a terrible broadband penetration outside of main cities and I know of quite a lot of people still on dial-up connections that enter a url and click enter and go off and get a cup of tea while they wait for the page to load. Even the odd image here and there can add up and benefit dial-up users.

On a personal side, I feel that a site/app can look and feel just as good if not better with as few images as possible once designed correctly. I actually hate images being used as links now. You can do a lot of nice stuff now-a-days with CSS3 and jQuery which sorted negates the need for images as links, with that said there will always be exceptions.
APRAI - Custom Theme - SMF 2.0.5


Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
  • Posts: 16,079
Re: Choosing useless images to remove...
« Reply #2, on April 20th, 2013, 07:52 PM »
I agree, I prefer textual links handled nicely, rather than icons + texts in some situations...
Hell, even the mini-menus and moderation buttons in Wedge aren't exactly very pretty. Their icons lack unity. It shows less in mini-menus because I was a bitch and added an opacity hack to make it 'look like' they had unity, ah ah... (Well, as long as it works...)

In this particular case, I'm not only looking into removing notify.gif, but also removing the Notify link from all pages except Display pages...