Jurriaan Schulman wrote:
Yes, but I mean that there is a copy of this table
used for *every* article,
which uses disk space. Normally, if you use a relational database you use a
reference to a table (the structure). The table template is stored only
once, only the field data (the content) is saved to disk and is unique for
every record.
"Disk space is cheap" is the wiki mantra ;-)
(well, one of them, anyway)
The pink
background colour is to indicate that we are dealing with an
animal species. Green is used for all plants. What colour change would
you be proposing.
It was only an example. I am quite happy with the pink colour. But imagine
that a few years from now the wikipedians decide it is better to use yellow,
or the text shouldn't be centered, or be bold or italic or... They would
have to alter the background colour for *every* table by hand, which may be
hundreds of thousends tables by then.
On the other hand, if you use one table as a template and derive all others
from it, you would only have to alter this one template table, you see? It
is a bit like "Styles" in MS Word, you define the style once and when you
change it, all text with this style is changed too. This may not be
important for a letter, but if you write a book with hundreds of pages, it
saves a huge amount of time.
My upcoming wiki table markup can (and will) include the ability to use
"class=xyz" statements, with the style defined in CSS, for
often-repeated tables. That ought to do just fine.
I just think we should try to design a template for
articles on animals (or
any other subject for that matter) with field like "scientific name", "
distribution" etc. If everyone would use this template it would be easier to
search certain patterns (which species lives in Africa? --> search the
distribution field) and to alter things (see above).
The machine-readable wikipedia was suggested over and again. Maybe we
should start one! But for this 'pedia, machine-readable would mean
human-unreadable (at least the source), and that's a no-no ;-)
Magnus