On 4/5/06, Conrad Dunkerson conrad.dunkerson@worldnet.att.net wrote:
While people complain about the complexity which templates have taken on it is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between increasing template complexity/functionality and decreasing article complexity. Tables no longer have to be convoluted HTML or wiki-markup blocks in the article themselves... they've been replaced by a short template call. And conditional logic has made it so that the average user can insert one of those templates into an article and fill out the parameters to produce a perfect table without needing to understand the underlying table code at all. That wasn't possible previously... they ''had'' to know table markup (or HTML) in order to edit tables.
I think this is the most important thing people need to understand about template complexity: by making the *template* complex, we're making the articles *simpler* and easier to maintain.
-L