On 22/01/2008, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/21/08, Angus McLellan angusmclellan@gmail.com wrote:
Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24 May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise?
A meta-template approach would be ideal for handling afterthoughts such as this. For this particular problem, {{birth date and age}} and related templates could be modified to gracefully handle ranges or approximate time frames in the less common case where the exact date isn't known to us.
That's the sort of thing I mean by fixing the plumbing but avoiding changing the interface (the top-level templates you drop into an article to put in an infobox). People will complain about a change to the visible templates they use, but adding features to the plumbing underneath shouldn't create a fuss if they don't break stuff - any more than all the horrors^Wwonders possible with parser functions broke old wikitext.
- d.