[Wikipedia-l] What a wiki table syntax needs to do to work with current table layouts

[Jens Frank]

On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 04:56:01PM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> 
> > Here goes:
> > [br=1,cs=0,al=r,cp=2||
> > [al=c,bc=pink|                         ''Owls'''                   
> |]
> > [al=c| Northern spotted owl |]
> > [al=c,bc=pink| '''[[Scientific classification]]''' |]
> > [|
> > [al=c||
> > [| [[Kingdom (biology)|Kingdom]]: || [[Animalia]] |]
> > [| [[Phylum]]: || [[Chordata]] |]
> 
> ...
> 
> > [| a simple table || with two columns |]
> > [| and two        || rows             |]
> 
> 
> The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that CSS is the way
> to go.  It's not even a browser issue, really: browsers that can't
> handle CSS probably can't handle the things it's being used for 
> anyway,
> and by definition they lose no content, only style, so I think that's 
> fine.
> Your table syntax is nice if we really need nested tables, so adding 
> my
> style syntax (which requires relaxing the "start of line" requirement 
> a
> bit to skip over style tags that precede elements), we get:
> 
> {species}
> {pink}[| '''Owls''' |]
> {cent}[| Northern spotted owl |]
> {pink}[| '''[[Scientific classification]]''' |]
> [|
> [| [[Kingdom (biology}|Kingdom]]:   ||  [[Animalia]]   |]
> [[ [[Phylum]]:                      ||  [[Chordata]]   |]
> 
> ...
> 
> |]
> 

I'd prefer the styles to be named for content markup, not for layout.
They most probably will be skin-dependend. So in Cologne Blue the
header of the table will be a greyish blue, in standard skin it
will be pink and in StarTrek skin there will be a yellow background
image with round corners. (Only examples, of course). So I think it 
should read:

{species}
{header}[| '''Owls''' |]
{subheader}[| Northern spotted owl |]
{header}[| '''[[Scientific classification]]''' |]
[|
[| [[Kingdom (biology}|Kingdom]]:   ||  [[Animalia]]   |]
[[ [[Phylum]]:                      ||  [[Chordata]]   |]

...

|]


> And hopefully, the stylesheet that defines {species}, {pink} and 
> {cent}
> can be re-used by all the articles on different species, and different
> specialized stylesheets can be produced for things like elements if
> needed.  And exactly the same syntax is used for images, lists, 
> headers,
> and everything else.
> 
> {right}[[image:spottedowl.jpg]]
> 
> {nobullets}* Item
> * Item
> * {red Item}
> 
> {smaller}== Major heading ==
> 
> {roman}# Item
> # Item
> 
> {quote
> Long excerpt from book, indented and italicized...
> }

I think the problem with this markup is that you only have
an "open"-tag and can't nest them.

How would you combine it, for example, to have a small label below the
floating-right image? 

== 1 ==
{right}[[image:spottedowl.jpg]] ''Spotted owl''

would most probably render "spotted owl" in one line to the 
right of the image.

== 2 ==
{right}[[image:spottedowl.jpg]] <BR> {center} ''Spotted owl''

comes to mind. But this might create very long lines, which is not
very readable.

== 3 ==
OTOH, nesting tags fastly makes us reinvent XML with something like
{right [[image:spottedowl.jpg]]
  <BR>
  {center ''Spotted owl''}
}

(Hmm, looks Lisp'ish ...)

== 4 ==
Not sure whether it can be done with CSS only or whether it would
require help from PHP:

{labeledfloating}[[image:spottedowl.jpg]] Spotted owl

rendering to

<div style="float: right">
  <img src="/uload/a/b/c/spottedowl.jpg"><BR>
  <center>
    <em>Spotted owl</em>
  </center>
</div>

That is, the first word would be taken as an image, the
following as label to be centered below the image.

== 5 ==
Make it look wiki, I think this is similar to
the way Jan Hidders proposed:

>> [[image:spottedowl.jpg|Spotted owl]] >>




My favourite is still number 5 for floating images and to have
{style} only for tables.



Regards,

JeLuF