Aryeh Gregor wrote:

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Hay (Husky) <huskyr at gmail.com> wrote:

...

I don't know if making such an infobox that does not support IE6 and IE7 is a good idea.

I've now added code to make IE6/IE7 degrade gracefully:

http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/

It doesn't even support Firefox 2 . . . inline-block wasn't implemented in Gecko until 1.9 (Firefox 3).

Correct. The purpose of the case study was not to make all things work for all browsers, but rather to see how features supported by all modern browsers (in particular CSS 2.1) can improve Wikipedia. Whether FF2 should still be on the list of supported browsers is not for me to decide. At some point, however, it will be dropped from the list and it is worth preparing for that moment.

Also: "It should be fairly easy to do so, as the HTML code is generated by templates." Has he *looked* at the templates? :)

Yes, and they are quite scary :)

That's why I chose to write my ideal HTML code by hand instead of trying to change the templates. What the sentence tries to say, however, is that not all articles have to be changed, "just" the templates.

The major reason why inline style is used on Wikipedia is, of course, because ordinary editors don't have the ability to use stylesheets. And while admins do, they can only effectively add markup to *all* pages at once, regardless of whether they contain the exact infobox in question. An awful lot of the provided CSS is nation-box-specific, and so useless in 99.99% of Wikipedia's articles. (Literally: there are about 2.7 million articles, and I'm pretty sure there are less than 270 recognized nations.) But all that CSS would have to be served with all of them.

It could be done in one style sheet. And that style sheet wouldn't have to be very complex, if one can agree on a set of class names (i.e., a micro-format) which is inter-national.

Cheers,

-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome