[Wikipedia-l] generic markup and miscoded templates

[Tom Parmenter]

|From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
|Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 21:36:09 -0700
|
|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.
|
|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.
|
|Best of all, the code to do this detection already exists in PediaWiki;
|it's being used to decide what style of automatic header numbering to use.
|(Not that I've ever looked at the code), but this should be an easy one.
|
|Tom is happy, because good HTML is being produced.
|[I forget who the principal opponent is] is happy,
|because current articles don't have to be rewritten.
|At least I hope that y'all're happy; responses?
|

Tom is unhappy because Tom doesn't care about good HTML; Tom wants
good generic markup in the Wikipedia that will permit various
processors, HTML and otherwise, including future processors that we
know nothing about, to produce output that is organized and presented
as it was originally designed to be presented in the Wikipedia.  

Spaghetti code is spaghetti code, even when it's text.  

Put garbage in, and garbage comes out, even when it's text.

Each article in the Wikipedia is an entry in a database.  Entries in
databases ought to be organized so that they will be interpreted
correctly by whatever application is looking at them.  That means
putting things in the right slots, which is why we use templates for
common forms of articles, and why we attempt to follow a regular
style, and what is the real purpose of generic markup.

In the specific case of the == and === and ====, that means that not
only will the headlines be presented in appropriately sized faces, but
that the organization of the article can be "understood" by an
application that is, say, looking only for External Links, or, say,
creating an outline from a Wikipedia article, or, who knows what some
future application might be able to do with properly organized
material that it can parse according to some well established rules.  

Of course, that is all an ideal and there are thousands of articles
that don't conform, but if new articles conform and old articles are
fixed by people who understand that the present Wikipedia is not the
only way the articles in the Wikipedia will or can be used, then the
Wikipedia will be better, worth more, used more, and last longer.

The genial and hardworking Ram-Man, by the way, has already fixed all
the city, county, state, and whatever templates to work correctly in
the future without any fuss.  

That naive and cranky guy,

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88