On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, tarquin wrote:
A while ago some bright spark thought to put a DIV around the statement of maths theorems, with a dashed purple border. Today it's boxes with coloured borders for disambiguation notes.
Here's why these are bad ideas:
Firstly, Wikipedia is a wiki. That means source text should be as light on markup as possible. Knowing HTML should not be a prerequisite. We currently have HTML for tables and floated images -- this is something to be dealt with, not taken as a springboard for more.
In technical terms, using HTML is a hack; in non-technical terms, HTML is the equivalent of making something work with duct tape, chewing gum or an unbent paperclip.
If that's a fair paraphrase, I agree. Actually, after a brief period of ignorance, I've always held that HTML should focus more on presenting the material, not in producing flashy tricks of presentation. (Or so I say now, having abused the <br> tag on a few pages full of lists.)
But the problem isn't people like me, it's those folks who discover that you pull off certain tricks by embedding HTML in a Wiki page, then go wild doing just that. The problems of education just keep coming back to haunt us.
Geoff