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For anyone familiar with CSS, I could use some help choosing which sections could be standardized. I would include:
- A "table.infobox" class, which would make it so the table floats to the right of the text, sets the border-width and default border-color, margin, etc.
- A "table.infobox > img" for defining the dimensions of images in the infobox. This could really help with the problem of over-large images by setting max-width to 250px.
- A "table.infobox > .header" for the name/title parameters of the box. This would set the line-height and boldness, mostly. The background-color would still have to be set manually.
- A "table.infobox > .subheader". I like the way some of our templates have sub-sections ({{Location}} has subsections for Geographic, Societal, Political, and Historical information). It breaks up the information to make it more easily readable. This would be very similar or even the same as the .header section, defining line-height and such.
If you don't know CSS, that's fine too. Assuming I get approval to update the templates, I'd like input on HOW exactly the infoboxes should look. Should the text be the same size as that in {{Location}}? Should the parameter title (for example, the phrase 'Caster level' in the example shown in {{Magic item}}) be bolded? Should the second column's text be left-aligned or right?
I'd like to hear some more of our members, particularly some of the admins (Fw1908a, in particular, as I'm not sure who has the power to edit the wiki's CSS rules).
I think Cronje has done an awesome job at creating the default infobox template to which I think, as others have mentioned, all infoboxes should conform.
There isn't actually a title or a subtitle on the infobox as it currently stands, so it would be good to add that in there too.
One thing to check would be if the 'parameter' text was very long, or the 'data' text was very long, and it wrapped onto multiple lines, would this still look okay, or would there be issues?
Finally one thing to bear in mind is that we have over 10,000 articles, so this new format must work universally with all the old articles. If we have to change several thousand articles (except very minor changes) I think we would be in for a difficult time.
Just let me know what CSS you would like to be added to the main wiki stylesheets and I can make this happen.
table.infobox { background-color: #FFFFFF; border: 1px solid #A9A78A; color: #000000; float: right; font-size: 88%; max-width: 350px; vertical-align: top; } table.infobox > tr {vertical-align: top;} table.infobox td.infoboximage {text-align: center;} table.infobox td.infoboximage > img {max-width: 300px;} table.infobox td.title, table.infobox td.subtitle { background-color: #BDBCAD; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.2em; padding: 0.25em 0.33em 0.33em; text-align: center; } table.infobox td.title {font-size: larger;} table.infobox td.subtitle {background-color: #DFDECF;} table.infobox tr td:first-child { min-width: 150px; text-align: left; } table.infobox tr td:last-child {text-align: right;} table.infobox td.categories {text-align: right;}
I am looking forward to seeing the new standardised format in action!
I removed the input parameter from {{Computer game}}, as there was no documentation on what it's supposed to represent on either this wiki or the one it's based off of.
I left {{Discipline}}, {{Evocation}}, {{Exploit}}, {{Hex}}, {{Prayer}}, and their individual sub-templates alone, as the only difference between them and {{Spell}} is their coloring. All of them are pretty much different names for their class's abilities; hex for warlock, prayer for divine spellcasters, etc.. I know User:Niirf-sa put a lot of work into them, but they don't really add much to the wiki and I vote to get rid of them. If you prefer, I can easily add a new parameter to {{Spell}} for changing the background-color of the title parameter and have each of the other templates call on the Spell template.
For the same reason as above, I did not modify {{Primordial}}, as it's just a differently-colored {{Deity}}.
I also left {{Help}} alone, since it doesn't really fit with the other infoboxes and should have its own sort of style, in my opinion.
For {{Magic item}}, I added several new parameters for sentient items. Communication is for how the item communicates, languages for the item's known languages, and alignment for if the item has an alignment.
For {{Organization}}, I've removed the reckoning, formedday, formedmonth, formednotes, disbandedday, disbandedmonth, and disbandednotes parameters, as they're unnecessary. The template doesn't do any calculations between the time of forming/disbanding the organization (as {{Person}} does for birth/death/destruction), so editors can put everything in the formed and disbanded parameters. As for reckoning, I've never seen anything dated using another calendar besides Dalereckoning. I'll go through each page that uses the template to make sure nothing got broken. I've similarly removed the page parameter, though I've made this backwards-compatible so it doesn't throw anything off.
Finally, I had to edit {{Alignment grid}}, as it didn't agree with the new infobox for some reason. Now it's fixed width.
I still need to fiddle with {{Conflict}}. It's going to take a bit more work, since it has four columns instead of two. Then I need to back and see which articles use {{Organization}} to make sure I didn't break anything by removing the reckoning parameter. Please let me know if you see anything that looks wrong.
I'm afraid I still think the template is too wide though. I do think we should fix the width at 275px, and have every infobox at this width, to provide further uniformity. At the moment, there is no left margin on the infobox, so some text looks a bit scrunched against its edge. If you were to add a left margin on a 350px infobox, call that 360px, the width of the text area on the default skin is only 680px, so there is less than half of the room left for the article text, which does make it look scrunched up.
There's also a weird display bug happening for certain articles in some browsers. For example, if I go to the Harpers article in Chrome, the infobox takes up the entire available space, and in Internet Explorer it takes up about 95% of the available space. However, in Firefox, SeaMonkey, Flock, and Opera, it appears as intended. I'm still trying to track down why this is.
There is a min-width set on the first td element, which means that on, for example, Harpers, despite none of the labels being that long, the "Enemies" of the Harpers wrap more than I think is necessary. I think it might be better to lose the min-width and perhaps replace it with some right margin on the first td element? What do you think?
I could never find the problem, and as far as I can see I have done everything exactly the same as the {{Person}} template. See Bell Market to see what I mean.
Can anyone help, urgently, to get rid of the whitespace from where it shouldn't be?
<td colspan="2" class="title"> Bell Market </td></tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" class="subtitle"> Geographical information <p><br> </p><p><br> </p> </td></tr> <tr> <td> Area </td>
The reason {{Location}} wasn't updated was that it wasn't categorized, and so I overlooked it. Sorry about that!