Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/26/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
It would be somewhat trivial to expand the extension to allow customising the class output according to the tag used; if another use case pops up, we can add another tag and class combination.
That seems to be the strongest argument for making a generic tag wrapped in a template to set the class. Currently, if a user at fooboo wiki wants to get the behaviour of <poem> for something that isn't a poem, their choices are:
- Wrap it in <poem> anyway, defeating the whole point of semantic mark up.
- Attempt to imitate it by implementing something that doesn't quite
work as well with templates. 3) Attempt to hack the mediawiki source code to copy <poem>, making something nonportable. 4) Attempt to convince the MediaWiki developers of the validity of their "use case" and wait for it to get implemented. 5) Wrap <poem> in a <div class="foo">, store that in a template, carry out step 4) and reimplement the template with a clean new tag.
Speaking as a general non-technical user I would have no compunctions about using the <poem> tag wherever it works, including recipes and other non-poetic circumstances.
The average user is intersted in what works, not just the satisfaction of the arcane technical aesthetics of IT specialists.
Ec