User blog comment:Dizzycomputer/Character Infoboxes/@comment-39097528-20200416100523/@comment-3182821-20200416110614

Ahhh yes, sorry I forgot to come back to you!

I think we need to consider what the purpose of the infobox is - and how it changes on mobile vs PC. On PC layouts, it's a nice bit of formatting that gives us easy reference right at the top - but on mobile, it's the entirity of the "above the fold" data - you see infobox, scroll on past advert, then get page content. (speaking of which, how many adverts.... ugh there's some content in there somewhere!)

So what is the bullet point, key data about a character? "Three Words", gender, age, appearance... I think there should be some sort of indication of their role too, so I'm not sure about language but "Dancer", "Singer", "Featured Character" - if someone is looking up Tumblebrutus, there should be some indication that he's a dancer/acrobat, Bombalurina should indicate she's a singer/dancer role. I'm coming from the angle of someone who doesn't know the show, but heard a performer played this role - "who's that then?" Or perhaps the parent of a young performer cast in the school production. I don't think our existing categories of "Song Cats" and "Chorus Cats" quite express the same information, Tumble and Bomba being very different roles within that same category. "Role Requirements" maybe?

I'm not actually sure, if we take the international names out, that "Also Known As" actually works for say, "The Railway Cat". I wonder if we can get the infobox code to spit out that kind of subtitle as a second line under the character name? I don't want to re-name the page as that will get too close to the song page. There's the function for a caption under the profile pic... hmm. The problem for me is that Skimble isn't known as "The Railway Cat" in the sense of it being a name, it's his role. Jenny is "a Gumbie Cat", etc, it's not alternate names, but role titles. Off the top of my head, Macavity is the only one who'd have multiple titles, "the Mystery Cat", "Napoleon of Crime", "The Hidden Paw"? Basically, I'm not sure the "Also Known As" field has value other than listing international names.

As for the International names - how much are we catering to a multilingual audience? If someone heard there was a cat named "Edgar", does their search need to be answered super quick landing on Skimble's page? I think probably no. But I don't know if I like the idea of a top-level heading for this information, it probably would be better suited to a sub-heading under the "Role" section? You're onto a winner with it giving us more space to define those names too. At the moment they SHOULD be links to the production that name originated in, which I'd like to keep, but having more text would also be good, again for mobile convenience when you can't hover over a link.