On Friday 02 August 2002 06:31 pm, JeLuF wrote:
I'd prefer the styles to be named for content markup, not for layout. They most probably will be skin-dependend. So in Cologne Blue the header of the table will be a greyish blue, in standard skin it will be pink and in StarTrek skin there will be a yellow background image with round corners.
Oh no! Pink was chosen to be the color for animals. Lightgreen is for plants, lightblue for fungi, lightgrey for bacteria and khaki for protists. On top of that there are slightly different tables for phylums/divisions, classes, orders, families, genera and species is even more different (see: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Sainfoin). So any markup will have to be flexible. (the different heading colors for the elements tables signify which chemical series the element is in. I've also been kicking around the idea of having different heading colors for the countries articles too with each continent represented by a unique color. We could even have different heading fill colors for each political party for the presidents tables also...).
I will work on making taxonomy tables for each taxon of Sainfoin for examples of each slightly different tables.
--mav
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Oh no! Pink was chosen to be the color for animals. Lightgreen is for plants, lightblue for fungi, lightgrey for bacteria and khaki for protists. On top of that there are slightly different tables for phylums/divisions, classes, orders, families, genera and species is even more different (see: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Sainfoin). So any markup will have to be flexible.
so: {species_animal} for the whole table {species_animal_name} {species_animal_name} {species_animal_header}
Jan wrote:
is it posible in a style to set the border value of a table?
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
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.
-- Jan Hidders
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
On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 12:53:31PM +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
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.
No, not in this case. I would agree with you if this was a normal encyclopedia or any other big document with a fixed set of writers, but in the case of Wikipedia I don't think markup by content is the right way. The problem with that is that you require the users to know what types of content are defined and how they should be used.
However, WikiWiki is based on the fact that there is a very limited set of markup that is fixed and easy to learn. Trying to understand what the abstractions are that the creators of the styles had in mind may not be easy for everybody. Moreover, since the styles would be editable the markup would in some sense become a moving target. You cannot get much unWikier than that.
Have you noticed that Lee's proposal is starting to look more and more like LaTeX with command redefinitions? I am really a big fan of LaTeX and write all of my scientific work in it, (there markup by content is a must-have) but I don't think it is a good markup language for Wikipedia.
+-------------------------------+ | Demoscopic | +---------------+---------------+ | Inhabitants: | 600.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | Male | 304.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | Female | 296.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | Under 18 years| 127.000 | +---------------+---------------+ | History | +---------------+---------------+ | Founded | 1230 | +---------------+---------------+ | City rights | 1487 | +---------------+---------------+
Say, that's also not a bad table markup syntax. :-)
I wouldn't want to always remember which background to use for a factsheet header. Content markup is much easier:
You'd still have to look up which style exactly you would have to use. The most easy way to do that is to go to the pages that are similar to your page. Doing some cut & paste is then probably not beyond your capabilities. :-)
Having three or four of these standard table styles will probably cover 80% of all needed tables.
Sure, maybe now, but what will happen in the future as Wikpedia grows and the group of contributers will become bigger and more diverse? And then I'm not even thinking of what will happen if we replace the other HTML stuff.
-- Jan Hidders, who never knew that keeping things simple could be so hard
On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 09:44:48AM +0100, tarquin wrote:
Jan wrote:
is it posible in a style to set the border value of a table?
Thanks. But that's CSS2 specific, isn't it? That would not work on some old Netscape browsers.
-- Jan Hidders
On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Oh no! Pink was chosen to be the color for animals. Lightgreen is for plants, lightblue for fungi, lightgrey for bacteria and khaki for protists. On top of that there are slightly different tables for phylums/divisions, classes, orders, families, genera and species is even more different (see: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Sainfoin). So any markup will have to be flexible.
Is this really what we want? To have articles decide layout and colors? I think this is a very scary development - this is the same thing that happened to the web in the early days, and look where we are now! Next thing, we have [[flash:fun.swf]]!
The beauty of Wikipedia is its content, and that this content is separate from the form. If we start using tables for anything else than structuring content (that is layout, coloring, etc.) we risk seriously f#!$"ng up later chances for presenting the content in a new way.
To blind people, or having your cellphone read it out aloud. Printing, XLM, etc. Information will be lost here if tables become too powerful, and start being used for non-content purposes.
But won't a colorless place look boring? Deal with it! Wikipedia already looks boring! Let someone make a flash front end one day, instead.
Aren't anyone else worried about these things?
-- Daniel
I just wanted to say, that I'm all on the side of the "keep it simple" fraction. Someone (Hawking?) said, that with every math formula in a book you loose half of your readers, or something like that. I think with every new wiki tag we will loose a big amount of new editors (not readers)!
The fraction of people coming to Wikipedia and not knowing (and not wanting to know) the concept of a markup language is growing every day. Especially older people are frightened to damage something on our site. And the more the text they see in the article differs from the one in the EditBox, the likelier it gets that they just hit the "back" button. That's at least my experience in convincing people to take part in our project.
But won't a colorless place look boring? Deal with it! Wikipedia
already looks
boring! Let someone make a flash front end one day, instead.
All those CSS ideas are interesting and attractive, but wouldn't it be better to keep these things for the staff which creates the stable, "just for readers" set of articles in one or two years?
I say, better loose some readers then loose some editors. And I think this is even more true for the international Wikipedias.
Kurt
On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 03:39:01PM +0200, Kurt Jansson wrote:
I just wanted to say, that I'm all on the side of the "keep it simple" fraction. Someone (Hawking?) said, that with every math formula in a book you loose half of your readers, or something like that. I think with every new wiki tag we will loose a big amount of new editors (not readers)!
The fraction of people coming to Wikipedia and not knowing (and not wanting to know) the concept of a markup language is growing every day. Especially older people are frightened to damage something on our site. And the more the text they see in the article differs from the one in the EditBox, the likelier it gets that they just hit the "back" button. That's at least my experience in convincing people to take part in our project.
Hi Kurt,
I totally aggree, it should stay simple to contribute. But at the moment wikipedia develops in a bad direction. Take a look at
http://www.wikipedia.com/w/wiki.phtml?title=Duesseldorf&action=edit
for an example of markup that even scares me (and I'm HTML-literate for nearly 9 years).
This is the markup to be stopped.
Regards,
JeLuF
"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" daniel@copyleft.no wrote: ---
Is this really what we want? To have articles decide layout and colors? I think this is a very scary development - this is the same thing that happened to the web in the early days, and look where we are now! Next thing, we have [[flash:fun.swf]]!
IMHO, it is a Good Thing to have all articles within the same encyclopedia that deal with similar content to use similar layout. It would also help to develop a reputation as a source of knowledge, compared to a "random dump of factoids".
Of course, an editor can still use it as the latter, but there should be an easy way to make wikipedia look a little more "organized" than the whole web. After all, we apply our own standards on content, why not on style and layout as well, where it makes sense?
Magnus
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