Popup titles displaying half-lives when hovering over table cells were added in January 2006. For background and discussion see Talk:Isotope table (complete)#Alternatives for displaying colour legend.

Presumably this was for performance, but there was no documentation and it was by an anon IP. Is there any way we can tell how this change actually affects performance? --JWB 21:44, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Here is a proposal for splitting the longer-lived categories into more precise bands, with the colors based on interpolation of the present ones. Red is left as stable here, so this proposal is disjoint from the one at Talk:Isotope table (complete)#Red to gray?. Or, if we do adopt gray for stable, the 100ky+ categories can be shifted down one color, as the colors for 10k-100k and 100k-1m do not look very distinct, at least on my monitor. --JWB 16:53, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to give gray (#BBB) a try as nobody has objected. Discuss here or at Talk:Isotope table (complete)#Red to gray?. --JWB 19:04, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I liked the Isotope table, but found the coloring scheme a bit counter-intuitive: it seemed to me that "energetic" colors on the warm end of the spectrum should represent the more unstable elements, while cooler colors should go on the more stable end of the scale. Here's a proposed scheme:

What do you think? --Erudy (talk) 20:16, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree. However, I would suggest finishing the table with the sequence orange > yellow > white for a better lightness gradient. --IanOsgood (talk) 19:57, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Good point...although I didn't change the order of the colors (I wanted to keep the traditional coolness/warmth gradient), I lightened the "orange" color into more of a pink to maintain the light/dark gradient. Also I removed one of the more blue colors to reduce ambiguity. How does this appear on other people's screens?

Erudy (talk) 15:35, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

This is also being discussed at Talk:Isotope table (complete)#Red to gray?. Physical color temperature and traditional color symbolism give opposite results. There is also the possibility of using brightness or saturation to indicate stability and reserving color for decay mode or something else, for example as in the unimplemented Wikipedia:WikiProject_Isotopes#Color_scheme. In any case, I want to split up the halflife categories into finer ones. --JWB (talk) 17:55, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Interesting point about the opposition of physical color temperature and psychological color temperature. Personally, I find the "psychological" version more compelling, at least in this context. I think the whole point of a graphical device such as Isotope table is to make information quickly and clearly accessible, and I think the "psychological" spectrum does that better, even if it's not as "accurate". It would be more accurate to lay all the isotopes out in writing on some gigantic spreadsheet, giving their precise half lives etc. Of course such a spreadsheet would be unreadable.

Wikipedia:WikiProject_Isotopes#Color_scheme is certainly an ambitious proposal, and I guess I'm not sure that it is not trying to cram too much information into the available space. I feel like we can communicate one piece of information (length of half-life) in a clear and intuitive way (using of couple dimensions of spectrum, ie "psychological" cold->warm plus dull->bright), or we can try to communicate more pieces of information (length of half life and type of decay) with less clarity ("pastel->saturation/brightness" for one and "scientific" cold->warm for the other) I see the value of communicating type of decay, but wonder if it wouldn't be more effectively done with some sort of symbol rather than a color? Wouldn't having, I don't know, a β tucked into the corner of the box (perhaps underneath the isotope number?) more intuitively communicate beta radiation than the color blue, for instance? (I'm more of an interested layperson than an expert in all this, so maybe there is some sort of connection between the blue and beta radiation, but I don't know it.)

As for adding more "steps" in the spectum, and thus increasing precision, I'd say it's a great idea. However, I also feel that it's a different discussion.Erudy (talk) 16:23, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to be bold and try implementing this on iso1 and iso2Erudy (talk) 19:07, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm finding it harder to read, but I was used to the previous scheme since I've used and edited this page a lot. I do think that color temperature with blue hotter is intuitive to people familiar with any one of many fields like photography, metallurgy, or stellar evolution. Also note the names of the color/halflife templates are still the first letters of the original colors.

I do think that using saturation (the black to white dimension), perhaps along with color, to indicate halflife, would add readability. Currently, very unstable is white and stable is gray, so intermediate halflives should also progress along this scale, even if they also have color.

I've made some attempts to draft tables or lists of isotopes organized by other criteria like halflife; see my user page for links.

Indicating decay mode in some other way than color is not a bad idea if designed well, but it would also have to be implemented, which may be difficult for many schemes. To some extent decay mode is predictable from position on the chart (above the stable sequence, below, or high mass) and it is the exceptions that need to be highlighted. --JWB (talk) 19:42, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm still finding Erudy's scheme to be much harder to read. --JWB (talk) 00:46, 22 May 2008 (UTC)