[Wikipedia-l] generic markup and miscoded templates

[Tom Parmenter]

|From: Brion VIBBER <brion at pobox.com>
|Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 13:35:41 -0800
|
|Tom Parmenter wrote:
|> I have started a conversation in [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject
|> U.S. Counties]] about the fact that the templates for country, state,
|> county, and city all use the wrong markup, that is, sections headed
|> with === instead of ==.  I think this is important, but god knows
|> there are going to be a lot of erroneous articles.  I wish I'd noticed
|> before there were so many counties done by the redoubtable Ram-Man.
|
|Level-three headers (===) are well established as the standard header on 
|Wikipedia. If you hate this so much, better to simply redefine it to 
|pump out ideologically correct <H2> tags instead of <H3> rather than to 
|prescribe the change of thousands of pages and demand a change in markup 
|behavior.
|
|-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
|

It's not that I *hate* them.  I don't.  It's that you aren't supposed
to start in the middle, with H3, but at the beginning with H1, title
of article, H2, second level header, etc.  That isn't "ideologically
correct", that is standard markup, SGML, HTML, XML, SDML, you name
it.  

I wonder why I'm getting all this attitude from you when I am trying
to deal with this in a polite manner, carefully explaining it on the
talk page, announcing the issue here on the list.  

If you read what I wrote on the talk page, you'd see I understand the
issue, both sides, quite well.

The reason H3 has become the "standard" is that H2 is so godawful big
that everyone is intimidated out of using it.  There's nothing
standard about bad markup.  

Can the rhetoric and discuss the issue.  Does it matter if article
headers start in the middle?  If numbering doesn't work right?  If any
number of existing or imaginable passes over Wikipedia articles don't
work right?  And, if not, then why do we have generic markup at all?

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88