On 8/10/06, Simetrical &lt;Simetrical+wikitech(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: But not using a template. If you do it this way: {{template| *foo {{template2}} }} the parsing borks at the nested template. If you do it this way: Define {{opendiv}} as <div style="..."> Define {{closediv}} as </div> and then: {{opendiv}} *foo {{template2}} {{closediv}} then MediaWiki automatically closes the div tag for you, and it doesn't work. Steve

On 8/10/06, Jay R. Ashworth &lt;jra(a)baylink.com&gt; wrote: Yes, I know. My question is, is there any remotely elegant way I can achieve what seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to me: using a template to apply a character style to a block of text. Having to use a table (which is the only way I could find to do it) is not imho elegant. Steve

On 8/10/06, Jay R. Ashworth &lt;jra(a)baylink.com&gt; wrote: Yeah, and since nested templates apparently don't work, the end result is divs aren't going to work. It's not so much a question of not wanting to pollute my wikitext with HTML, it's more a question of actually wanting to reduce the amount of wikitext and wanting to gain some modularity. I really want to use a template to mark some text as having a certain attribute, then display that attribute some particular way (ie, grey, small text on a pale grey background or something). I guess the most elegant way would be to define a CSS class somewhere, then just do <div class="...">.....</div> This all makes me think that templates trying to be "clean" by refusing to leave dangling tags is probably going beyond what they were designed for - straight text substitution. Steve

Steve Bennett wrote: You do that using <div class='some_name'>. This allows you to specify the actual style (font, color, etc.) in the CSS, which is much more of a "template" in its literal meaning than {{...}} is. {{...}} should be called "macros". :-p Timwi

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Steve Bennett wrote: Technically speaking, the gobs of style information we find in lots of infoboxes and stuff should be tucked away in Common.css, unfortunantely, the average editor is not well versed enough to do something like that. The quick-n-dirty way is to do something like <div style="background:grey;">. The correct way would be to get an admin to define a contextually correct class name to use, like <div style="nameofblock"> that's independent of how it's going to be styled.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Steve Bennett wrote: Manual of Style?

Steve Bennett wrote: There is no reason why this shouldn't change. The purpose of the manual of style is to prescribe a consistent style, and the proper way to do this on the web is to prescribe the use of semantic CSS classes.

Steve Bennett wrote: "The CSS" is the CSS that is included in any particular page view. Currently the only way to include CSS in a page view is to place it on [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]], [[MediaWiki:Common.css]], or any page that is @import'ed from these. However, obviously, it is entirely possible to add a feature to MediaWiki that allows the inclusion of certain CSS on a specific page. One could even have the parser pick out all the 'class' attributes and include all the necessary CSS for those automatically. The only problem with things like this is that I'm the only one that seems to think it's a good idea, while most other people like to stay with old, limited and never-evolving systems. Timwi

Simetrical wrote: I don't need it, so no. If you want it, you do that.