On 25/12/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
My biggest criticism of it at this point is that
it's only available to
the geeks who use a monobook skin and know how to edit it. I'm not
going to stop using the classic skin, and I have no intention of
learning how to edit a css. I'm sure there are many other non-techies
in the latter group that would be kept away from the feature because of
that. A simple toggle in the user preferences would make a lot more sense.
I'm not sure it really is - it can be set to be visible there, sure,
but you can edit it at will through the "conventional means" - and,
right now, it's not meant to be read in the article as such.
The one thing that I wouild make clear about the
contents is that one
can add years when an author flourished. For some authors we anly know
the years when they wrote, and know nothing of their lives before or
after the time during which they wrote. Perhaps our German colleagues
have already thought of that.
This is certainly a handy idea, but it doesn't seem to be in the
standard format in de:. I've suggested a way of dealing with this on
the talk page - an additional optional line for "flourished", just as
a single year (for simplicity) or as a range -
|FLOURISHED=1200
|PLACE OF ACTIVITY=England
or
|FLOURISHED=1191-1208
|PLACE OF ACTIVITY=England
or something else along these lines
Even if it's just a single year, it allows us to say "ah, he's
thirteenth century" or the like. As it stands, if you don't have birth
and death dates, they could be contemporary or they could be biblical,
and we can't say at a glance - well, *we* can, but a computer can't.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk