Tom Parmenter wrote:
I have started a conversation in [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties]] about the fact that the templates for country, state, county, and city all use the wrong markup, that is, sections headed with === instead of ==. I think this is important, but god knows there are going to be a lot of erroneous articles. I wish I'd noticed before there were so many counties done by the redoubtable Ram-Man.
I think that having good HTML produced is moderately important. And I think that making editing easy and intuitive is very important. What is not important, however, is that the number of equal signs in the latter match up precisely with the number in the tag in the former.
When rendering a page, we should first measure all of the header markups and then render the shortest as <h2>, the next as <h3>, and so on. (Anybody that really needs a header of a specific size can still create this by putting the HTML tag in directly.) Then you can start with == or ===, or even = or =========, and it will still render as <h2> if it's the shortest one.
Best of all, the code to do this detection already exists in PediaWiki; it's being used to decide what style of automatic header numbering to use. (Not that I've ever looked at the code), but this should be an easy one.
Tom is happy, because good HTML is being produced. [I forget who the principal opponent is] is happy, because current articles don't have to be rewritten. At least I hope that y'all're happy; responses?
-- Toby