[Mediawiki-l] Headers

[Evan Prodromou]

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So, the way MediaWiki markup works now, something that looks like
"=this=" gets rendered as "<h1>this</h1>", and something that looks
like "==this==" gets rendered as "<h2>this</h2>", and so on with more
equal signs making deeper HTML header tags.

The problem with this is that the stylesheets we have render <h1> tags
really, really big. It seems like people try to avoid using one- or
even two-equals headers, just because they render outrageously large.

This seems like a bad precedent to me. The equal signs, in my opinion,
should be used more as *logical* section separators than for physical
formatting. I think that the top level of sections in a page should
use one equal sign -- always, without exception -- and subsections of
those sections should use two equal signs, and so on and so forth.

My question is: how can we get the rendering right so "=this=" renders
more neatly, and less obstructively, on a page? One quick-and-dirty
solution is to just have the rendering code shift everything down one
- -- "=this=" becomes "<h2>this</h2>", and "==this==" becomes
"<h3>this</h3>", and so on and so forth.

The problem with that strategy, of course, is that you bottom out at
five section levels, which I personally think is fine for pages at the
granularity of Wikitravel (and Wikipedia, AFAICT). When someone uses
two equal signs for a top-level section header, that's pretty much
what they're doing, anyways.

The other possibility is changing the stylesheets to make h1, h2, h3,
etc. tags somewhat smaller. This seems to be a little less flexible,
wouldn't necessarily work with all browsers, and is harder to get
right.

Suggestions, ideas, comments?

~ESP

- -- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide
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