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I can't help but notice that the separator is inconsistent with the rest of the site.

right below the question  Image

right after the comments Image

Proposed change

margin 2px Image <- probably this

margin 0px Image

Instead of

<span class="js-link-separator">&nbsp;|&nbsp;</span>

use

<span class="lsep">|</span>
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  • 20
    I am amazed by the sharpness of your vision. What is your ophthalmologist? Could you recommend him/her to all of us seniors? :-) Commented Jul 26, 2014 at 13:42
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    @Steve I usually have all webpages zoomed in more than 150%, that's how I got this question too. Commented Jul 26, 2014 at 14:57
  • And the age doesn't hurt for sure .... :-) Commented Jul 26, 2014 at 15:02
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    "add a comment" and "show x more comments" have more words, so it's reasonable that they should have a wider separator. Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 16:16
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    @Boann Mainly it's about the color, I prefer the 2px because it does feel less squished. Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 16:18
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    @Steve: Does the black separator between gray text not stand out to you? For me, it was the first thing I noticed. Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 17:15
  • 2
    @ruakh oh well, let's have this talk in 25 years from now... Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 20:11
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    @Steve: Sounds good. I'll add it to my calendar. :-) Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 20:15
  • @DaveChen : I just would be for removing the separator. Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 22:46
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    This is what I love about developers, full on pedantry! Commented Jul 28, 2014 at 15:08
  • Another bar that needs adjusting as its a bit moved to the left. Added red vertical lines to show the wrong alignment of the bar at the middle Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 12:43

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
12

I agree: why have different types of separators?

They should be consistent with a site's design: MSE's design doesn't use separators, so why does the new comment layout have them?

MSE design:

MSE Toolbar

MSE comment layout:

MSE Comments

Fixed:

Fixed design

This should definitely be fixed.

In the meantime, however, I've created a userscript that implements your suggested change on each SE site to follow the design of its toolbars.

The only snag I ran into with your suggestion was that the separator is still present when the comments don't overflow. It is merely hidden with the addendum dno to the class name, so you have to check to make sure that that is not present before changing the span's class (which would make it unnecessarily visible).

Trying to get around the way that Stack Exchange's dev team has implemented the show/hide behavior has created quite a few versions that try to replicate the proper workings of the comment system (see the revision history), but I've rewritten it in a way that should comply with SE's design and be future-proof (version 2.0). Until/if this is (not) fixed, the userscript should, for all intents and purposes, work the way that toolbars (share/edit/close/delete/flag) do on all sites in the network.

It makes the separator look like this (for SO):

New separator

That's much more in line with the separators for the toolbar:

Existing toolbar

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    Separators between widely spaced single-word hyperlinks don't seem to really add anything. But between sentence fragments... Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 23:01
  • @Deduplicator Maybe, but it should be consistent. That said, this is the definition of the lsep class for MSE, which is used for separators site-wide (it's hidden), so part of MSE's design is, quite literally, no separators (from what I can tell). Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 23:08
  • @Deduplicator Also, it's up to SE whether they want to keep or remove the separator (which is still in a trial period at this point) on MSE, but I'm using whatever each site uses for separators in the userscript for the sake of simplicity. Either way, it definitely should be changed from what it is now (at least on SO and similar sites). Commented Jul 27, 2014 at 23:15
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    Per AstroCB's suggestion, this fix is now also included in SOUP v1.20. Thanks! (The SOUP implementation differs slightly, in that it keeps the existing separator elements and just adds the lsep class and removes the &nbsp;s, but the result should look identical.) Commented Jul 28, 2014 at 14:10

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