tarquin wrote: 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 11:29:32AM +0200, Jan Hidders wrote: 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 09:44:48AM +0100, tarquin wrote: Thanks. But that's CSS2 specific, isn't it? That would not work on some old Netscape browsers. -- Jan Hidders

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. already looks 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

"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel(a)copyleft.no> wrote: --- 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