[Wikipedia-l] Re: Avoid tables -- keep it simple!

[Kurt Jansson]

Ray Saintonge schrieb:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 
>> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>
>>> It is a pure pipe dream to think that tables are going
>>> to go away because they are so damn useful and
>>> visually appealing to the great majority of our
>>> readers.
>>>
>>
>> We could eliminate them through code, i.e. don't let people enter
>> them.  This might be (and probably would be!) a terrible idea, but
>> it's important to keep in mind that unlike matters of prose style,
>> etc., we actually can control this one at the level of code-enforced
>> policy.
>>
>> I'm not saying that we should enforce that there be no tables.
>> But I do agree with the general critique that some of our pages are
>> too "over designed" and that tables have been overused to make pages
>> look pretty, at the expense of simplicity and of the ability to easily
>> render the pages in other media.  (Like text-browsers, for instance)
>>
> In standing up to be counted, I clearly come out in favour of tables. 

Of course tables are a good thing. But the more complicatet our "source 
code" gets, the more people shy away from editing it. Especially new 
users, who click on the edit button for the first time and only see 
interlanguage links and html code will never do it again, if they aren't 
firm with this.

I worried about the interlanguage links some time ago on this list, and 
Brion supposed to put them beneath the text, so they aren't the first 
thing people see. But I thought it wouldn't be nessesairy because 
Magnus' idea to keep them in a separate table was making progress. But 
if this will take longer we should ask people on the announcement pages 
to copy the interlanguage links beneath the text.

I like the idea of a table namespace very much, indeed we can handle 
tables like we do handle images now, or better like we will handle svg 
graphics in the future. Nobody will be frightened by something like 
"[[table:Parliament Discography]]". There should be links to the 
articles table pages beneath the edit box, and maybe the table borders 
could be clickable and lead to the corresponding table page.

Kurt