On 22/01/2008, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/21/08, Angus McLellan
<angusmclellan(a)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.