On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 11:29:32AM +0200, Jan Hidders wrote:
On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 10:02:55AM +0100, tarquin wrote:
tarquin wrote:
so: {species_animal} for the whole table {species_animal_name} {species_animal_name} {species_animal_header}
but it would be evern *smarter* if {species_animal} *knew* that
- the 1st row was a header, and therefore shaded
- the 3rd row was a subheader, and therefore shaded,
- rows 4-6 are should have no horizontal border between them them (thus
simulating the subtable) etc
Yes it would. But it would also mean you could not know what happens when you add rows (or columns) to the table if you don't know what the CSS style says.
Apoligies if I'm too negative about this idea. It's a very powerful idea and my heart jumps with joy at the thought that we can used it to get rid of HTML completely. However, it's just that for my feeling it makes formatting so complicated and untransparent. It just doesn't feel very democratic to me if you divide our contributers in those that know CSS and therefore can do formatting and understand what the styles do, and those that don't. I admit that the fact that I don't know CSS very well may play a part here, but it also shows how high the threshold for doing formatting would become.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. In every printed encyclopedia there are people writing content and others doing a consistent, efficient, easy to use layout. The efforts spent in redesigning Cologne Blue show how difficult layout is.
If we include markup to e.g. directly manipulate the colour of the table background or the floating of images it would be hard for skin authors to provide a consistent look and feel. A markup by content is always to be preferred.
I can't count the students sitting in front of me after having visited the professor who told them to swap chapters 3 and 5 and to make chapter 7 a section in chapter 6. They layouted by hand: To make a new chapter they wrote "5 Influence on global politics", marked the text, selected "bold" and "18 point" from the menubar. References were made by hand. Swapping chapters or just making section titles be underlined was a nightmare. With content markup and a separate mapping content->layout all these things are trivial tasks to do.
We already have mainly content markup in wikipedia. "== Header ==" is content markup. Using your preferences you may control whether headers are numbered or not. This can't be achieved if we would have used
{bold, 14 point}Header
to create headers.
Therefor, layouting the taxonomy tables should not just count paragraphs but label them by content in my opinion.
There should be a simple, default table layout for simple tasks, and a consistent style sheet aproach to add markup to the most often used types of tables. The simple table should already have optional style-tags available to achieve commonly used effects like a header line spanning the whole table, rendered with a pleasant background and a bold font, centered.
A common use of tables will be some fact-sheet, having two columns, some headers, floating right of the prosa, e.g. on the Beryllium page. This could be used for cities in the same way:
+-------------------------------+ | Demoscopic | +---------------+---------------+ | Inhabitants: | 600.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | Male | 304.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | Female | 296.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | Under 18 years| 127.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | History | +---------------+---------------+ | Founded | 1230 | +---------------+---------------+ | City rights | 1487 | +---------------+---------------+
I wouldn't want to always remember which background to use for a factsheet header. Content markup is much easier:
{{table:factsheet}} || |{header} Demoscopic || |Inhabitants |600.000 || |Male |304.000 || |Female |296.000
....
(Not sure whether this is a good way of table/style mixup, just some pseudo-code to show the principle).
Having three or four of these standard table styles will probably cover 80% of all needed tables.
Regards,
JeLuF