Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make a list of likely problem candidates:
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt
Looks like the third list is largely composed of templates that use raw HTML table markup inside {{#if}} (which, coincidentally, includes a great many of the most widely-used infoboxes). This is going to be fun! ;-)
Infoboxes are a very important application of templates. There needs to be some way conditionally add table rows based on whether or not a given template parameter is defined. When people complained about the argument separators in {{#if:}} clashing with table syntax, I told them to use HTML table tags instead. That seemed like a much better, more stable solution than {{!}}. If that's not going to work anymore, what exactly are people meant to do?
There are thousands of affected articles, and if there is no solution for this, then I don't think it is acceptable to put this change live.
Why is the template required to close its own tags? It would make things a lot easier if this was not required.
-- Tim Starling