Template talk:Redbox

From What The Wiki?!

Hi, Juerd you write on your Userpage that the use of

 <br> 

is evil. Now you have broken my template by putt ing in these Tags, maybe you coul live with the Heading lin on Item 1 an use some

<p>

if you want mor place between ITEM_1 and ITEM_2. The Pages of CERT and [Security]] etc, look bad with your changes. and the center for the Topic in the Main Page is not so bad, i think.

--Curry 22:54, 10 Jul 2005 (CEST)

There was originally some room between the heading and the rest of the stuff, on the main page. This went away when the template was created. I'm personally not a great fan of templates for basic stuff like this, exactly for this reason. The problem isn't that there is a template, but that the template was of course used wrong. There is absolutely no good point in having "ITEM_1", "ITEM_2" and "ITEM_3". They are undescriptive and unnecessary variables. A single "BODY", possibly with an added "HEAD" would be better

Center for headings is bad. It may not *look* bad, but it definitely *is* bad for usability. And since this is an informative site, not a designer's place, left alignment for headings is the only sane way to go. You will notice if you look around that most headings are left aligned (right aligned in right-to-left text). That is for many very good reasons.

--Juerd 00:43, 11 Jul 2005 (CEST)

In fact, if the red box is just that: a red box, then there shouldn't even be any distinction between HEAD and BODY, and users of the template should fill those details in themselves. I'm changing it to be like that. If you really don't like it, feel free to revert the changes. I'll call the single variable TEXT.

--Juerd 00:49, 11 Jul 2005 (CEST)

Because center does appear to make sense for single-line boxes, as used by the other Redbox using pages, I've added the variable ALIGN. The default of {{{ALIGN}}} is invalid html, but results in left. :)

--Juerd 01:05, 11 Jul 2005 (CEST)

Is that your way, to discuss something. Do some facts, instead of talking about them? Are you the guy who tells everyone how the things have to be? Align or font arent good html and template worked in the most cases, no one forced you to use it. If you think the Main Page is yours, you could have reverted my changes.

--Curry 02:28, 11 Jul 2005 (CEST)

Doing something immediately shows what it'll look like. As I understand it, wikis are collaborative efforts. No page, no template, no image and no untagged piece of text is considered anyone's property. Whenever there is something a visitor thinks he can improve, he shouldn't wait but instead just do it. That is how I am used to using wikis. Discussion can happen alongside, and sometimes in between, but waiting for the result of discussion is very un-wiki-ish.

I'm not willing to fight about this, and thus I repeat that if you don't like it, you can easily revert the changes I made.

I could have reverted your changes to the Main Page (which obviously is not mine), but since the idea behind the change is more than sound: a template to avoid redundancy and promote re-use, I chose to improve on the existing situation rather than to go back in history and undo your improvement.

Indeed I do express my opinion when it comes to how I think how something should be. Some stylistic elements are mostly a matter of usability and maintainability, where aesthetics aren't involved much. A centered heading combined with a bulleted list, for example, is a good example of what is impractical.

Font is indeed bad xhtml. They're correct html, but indeed this wiki outputs xhtml. It was not my choice to begin using font tags, but they were there when I added the Current issues box, and I copied existing style. (It's a h1 since yesterday, by the way.) As for align, that is entirely valid xhtml 1.0 transitional, if applied to tables.

Please know that my changes to the wiki are meant as an effort to improve the overall quality of the wiki, not as a way to challenge your decisions. Wikis are collaborative, not competitive.

--Juerd 11:17, 11 Jul 2005 (CEST)