Reducing tab size

[Mark Doliner]

On Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:17:03 +0200, Hylke Bons wrote
> I'd like to make a proposal for colored text. A good compromise I think.
> In some cases this is already used, like "offline" is grey, when someone
> is typing the text goes
> green, and when somone typed to you it's a blue bold text. I use 
> this a lot as indicators, and i can see at a glance when someone has 
> gone offline, so I can immmediatly close the tab without having to 
> switch to it first.
> 
> Color            
> Change                                                       Already 
> in Pidgin
> -------------+------------------------------------------------------+-----------
> Black            No changes in status                                
>       X Green           Back from away/idle                          
>          Red               Busy Blue              Gone away Gray     
>          Gone offline/idle                                           
>   X Purple          Typing                                           
>                   X, was green Text inbold   Message received/said 
> your name             X, was bold and red/blue
> 
> The colors follow the status icons. Actually there are only 3 
> additions, and some colors have been moved around to make more 
> sense. The bold can be combined with more colors, like when someone 
> has come back and messaged you: A green bold text. I think this 
> could work

I think this is a bad idea.  It's easy to remember that green means typing and
red means there's a message waiting for you (blue doesn't happen often enough
for it to matter, and gray is natural and doesn't need to be learned), but if
you add three more crazy colors into the mix it becomes a complex rainbow of
confusion.  We should make things simpler, not fancier.

Also, changing things that people are already used to is REALLY bad.

-Mark