On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 03:19:10PM -0700, lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
What happens if somebody inserts a new table/figure? You renumber? And the complexity step from doing no formatting to doing a little formatting becomes relatively big.
That's why I'm throwing the suggestion out there--to get feedback.
I know, but I think it is an inherent problem in your proposal. You can only solve this by associating identifiers with different parts. But note that you then have to associate these with not only figures and tables but also rules of tables and even cells in tables. Think of the table of Elements, for example. There is no way you can do that in an unobtrusive way and, again, your approach would force people who want to do only a little formatting to do cascading style sheets.
I also don't support your premisse that we need a lot of formatting for beautiful articles. I write in LaTeX and it makes my articles look good without me doing much formatting. Moreover, I see a few reasons why we don't want a lot of formatting in Wikipedia: less formatting means (1) less browser-dependency (2) a more consistent looks of pages and (3) less problems when we export articles to other formats.
I really hate MoinMoin syntax. It's every bit as ugly and complex as HTML, without the benefits.
Any table markup that allows you to do some formatting is going to look awful with all the bells and whistles. The advantage wrt. HTML is that simple tables are going to look really simple, and having a mark-up for tables that discourages a lot of formatting tricks may actually not be a bad thing.
As far as Tarquin's proposal is concerend, I also like it, but it has the inherent problem that you cannot do nested tables. For that you need to flag the beginning and end of a table (or a table rule), that's why I made my proposal.
Let for formally solicit proposals: folks, give me a clean, unobtrusive, user interface for (1) specifying spans and divs in wikitext with class and/or id; (2) attaching a stylesheet to a page, and being able to edit it.
Ok. Since I hate to be only negative I thought a little about this. The simplest I can come up with is something like:
{<identifier>{ .... }}
which would define a DIV with class <identifier>. All definitions for this identifier would then hold for things inside such a DIV, i.e., that's what you prefix the rules with. So a table could look like (I'm choosing my tablesyntax here, but any one would do):
{pres-tab{
[| '''President''' | '''Instrument''' |] [| Truman | Piano |] [| Abe Lincoln | Violin |]
}}
You can also imagine special styles for table rules and even cells:
{pres-tab{
[| President | Instrument |] {red-rule{ [| Truman {green-cell{ | Piano }} |] }} [| Abe Lincoln | Violin |]
}}
It looks awful of course but you sometimes need stuff like that to do for example the Elements table. Normal tables will look very simple, though.
You could even use it for colored fonts:
{redfont{ A♥ Q♥ 10♥ 5♥ 3♥ }}
or pretty much anything really.
Once you introduce such a style on a page there will be special links for every style used in the page on the bottom of the edit page that lead to a special style-edit page. It might also be intresting to introduce "global" styles that can be used in all pages.
Of course this all looks very much like XML with a slightly different notation. That is intentional.
-- Jan Hidders