On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
2009/9/25 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>:
* This will fundamentally change mediawiki and
the consequences of this
feature have not been considered
* It will support the creation of new interfaces from interfaces, simply
by
creating templates that create new templates and
using the interface to
that
template to create the new interface. Is this
correct?
Wait, what? Can you explain this better or provide an example?
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Roan, sorry that the idea is pretty hard to convey, I'll try again.
The basic idea is that you can create templates using templates
(just using current
tech). It's easy, you just pass parameters to a template that control
its output, and this
output is a new template. The parameters that you passed determine what the
new template looks like, and what it's output will be.
We can imagine a master template on Wikipedia that is used to generate all
infoboxes. It could work in arbitrary ways, but suppose it works this way:
The master infobox template creates a template for each wikiproject. The
template that it creates for each wikiproject further creates templates
representing every kind of infobox that this wikiproject uses. So you have a
master template that creates baby templates that create infobox templates.
Using current tech this isn't exactly feasible, only advanced users will do
it since you have to directly interact with the templates and it would be
tough to code up. But if you make such a feature highly usable, by, for
example, tacking an easy to use interface on top of it, the usage of such
techniques will proliferate.
More general kinds of interface builders that build all imaginable kinds of
interfaces are conceivable.
Is this not possible within the scope of the suggested system?