[Wikipedia-l] generic markup and miscoded templates

[tarquin]

Toby Bartels wrote:

>I think that having good HTML produced is moderately important.
>And I think that making editing easy and intuitive is very important.
>What is not important, however, is that the number of equal signs
>in the latter match up precisely with the number in the tag in the former.
>
>When rendering a page, we should first measure all of the header markups
>and then render the shortest as <h2>, the next as <h3>, and so on.
>(Anybody that really needs a header of a specific size
>can still create this by putting the HTML tag in directly.)
>Then you can start with == or ===, or even = or =========,
>and it will still render as <h2> if it's the shortest one.
>
That is certainly a very clever solution.
However, I'm concerned that users may be confused by 3= producing 
different results in different circumstances.

There are thousands of pages with spelling mistakes, thousands of "it's" 
that we can't even do a search for, and thousands of pages that use 
bolded text instead of headings -- these all need to be changed, and 
WikiWeeders like myself are gradually working through them.
I don't think that adding the changing of top-level 3= to the list is a 
big deal.
(there are also thousands of page titles to be bolded, names of novels 
and films italicized, links to be fixed, <BR> to be replaced with * & so on)

I would also like to add my vote to the "please change the stylesheet to 
H2 is smaller" issue. :) -- I agree with whoever said that the current 
H2 font size is the reason people don't use 2=