[WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes

[Håkon Wium Lie]

I wrote:

 >  > > http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
 >  > >
 >  > > What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make
 >  > > infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
 >  > 
 >  > Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of
 >  > our audience would not be happy...

 > I think it's possible -- with some careful crafting -- to make things
 > look ok, but not pixel-perfect in legacy browsers. In lynx, the
 > table-free version looks better than the original one, but IE6/IE7
 > users outnumber lynx by a some magnitudes. 

I've updated the document to better support IE6/IE7. To ensure
graceful degradation for these browsers, an additional style sheet is
added by way of IE's proprietary "comment" syntax. The resulting
rendering leaves dt and dd elements on separate lines, and the infobox
is therefore somewhat longer. I believe this rendering to be
acceptable and it will serve a subtle hint to upgrade to a more
standards-compliant browser. (IE8 was officially released last week,
and there are other offerings, too :)

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

The main benefit of this approach is vastly cleaner markup and reduced
size of the resulting HTML code. 

Cheers,

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