[WikiEN-l] Transclusion of formatting templates (again?)

Tue Jun 13 14:56:29 UTC 2006

On 6/13/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> (originally posted to tech list, but replying here because I think it's
> more on-topic here)
>
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >   There's a bot substituting {{clear}} with the equivalent HTML: <div
> > style="clear: both"></div>. There are several reasons I can think of
> > why this is a bad idea:
>
> Myself, I never understood the point in it at all. Why do you ever want
> to clear floating elements? It creates ugly stretches of empty space. If
> you feel that you need it in some particular situation, then surely that
> is an indication that the floating elements are positioned badly, and
> using "clear:both" only adds to it by also positioning the section
> headers badly.
>
> If there are too many images on the page, surely the page would look
> better if they were turned into a gallery or removed entirely, instead
> of stacking floating elements left and right.

It's quite useful on templates, since you can use a combination of
"clear" and <noinclude> to add usage notes directly to the template
page.  If "clear" isn't used and the notes contain an example use of
the template (this tends to come up with infoboxes), the example
(which is presumably "float: right") will overlap with the actual
rendered template.

(This is, admittedly, a rather obscure example.)

-- 
Kirill Lokshin