📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 01:43 PM UTC:
Indeed it was not obvious that the names can be clicked, and Fergus has already addressed that point in the text he added. The Interactive Diagram has a feature where it automatically creates a list of piece names (not to be confused with the piece table that normally is hidden directly below it) and the squares they are on somewhere in the article text (a 'satellite', for which you just have to provide an empty HTML list somewhere in your text with a certain 'id'), and such lists will then always be headed by the notice (highlighted with light-blue background) that you can click on the names. (E.g. see here.) But I did not use that here, as for games like this the list would become very long, and could not be kept in view together with the diagram. Which makes the clicking feature a bit useless, or at least very cumbersome. So I hand-formatted the list to surround the diagram. But I forgot to put the notice with it.
Auto-generating a table of text descriptions (as another optional satellite) might be possible in the future. But for games with as many pieces as this, I think it is really detrimental. It just swamps the reader with (mostly redundant) low-density information, making it hard to find the pieces about which something interesting can be said. Of course the table could be hidden initially.
But in earlier discussions the issue came up that people might have disabled JavaScript in their browser, and that in this case we still want to show them the essential information. Hidden tables are no good when there is no way to open those, and tables that are generated on the fly would not be there at all. The latter is a second reason not to use the auto-generated list of pieces in an article; I uploaded a screenshot of the diagramm as it is initially generated as a static PNG image between <noscript> tags, to insure that in any case people would see the mnemonics, in addition to the surrounding list of piece names.
Indeed it was not obvious that the names can be clicked, and Fergus has already addressed that point in the text he added. The Interactive Diagram has a feature where it automatically creates a list of piece names (not to be confused with the piece table that normally is hidden directly below it) and the squares they are on somewhere in the article text (a 'satellite', for which you just have to provide an empty HTML list somewhere in your text with a certain 'id'), and such lists will then always be headed by the notice (highlighted with light-blue background) that you can click on the names. (E.g. see here.) But I did not use that here, as for games like this the list would become very long, and could not be kept in view together with the diagram. Which makes the clicking feature a bit useless, or at least very cumbersome. So I hand-formatted the list to surround the diagram. But I forgot to put the notice with it.
Auto-generating a table of text descriptions (as another optional satellite) might be possible in the future. But for games with as many pieces as this, I think it is really detrimental. It just swamps the reader with (mostly redundant) low-density information, making it hard to find the pieces about which something interesting can be said. Of course the table could be hidden initially.
But in earlier discussions the issue came up that people might have disabled JavaScript in their browser, and that in this case we still want to show them the essential information. Hidden tables are no good when there is no way to open those, and tables that are generated on the fly would not be there at all. The latter is a second reason not to use the auto-generated list of pieces in an article; I uploaded a screenshot of the diagramm as it is initially generated as a static PNG image between <noscript> tags, to insure that in any case people would see the mnemonics, in addition to the surrounding list of piece names.