[Mediawiki-l] Headers

[Fred Bauder]

> From: Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
> Organization: Evan Prodromou
> Reply-To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
> <mediawiki-l at Wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 14:49:18 -0500
> To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <mediawiki-l at Wikimedia.org>
> Cc: Wikitravellers <wikitravellers at wikitravel.org>
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Headers
> 
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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?

By fiddling with the code one can make = h3 == h3 ==== h1 or any other
combination of the two. So there is no problem once you decide to use
smaller emphasis.

Fred
> 
> ~ESP
> 
> - -- 
> Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
> Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
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