LDC wrote:
There's no provision for nested tables. I
don't think
there's a good enough case for their necessity. Cell
backgrounds and borders can be done with styles.
Well I and many other very hard-working Wikipedians
think there is a very real need for nested tables.
They are used in each these converted articles;
organisms (that nested table has a border=0),
countries, heads of state, elements, and sub-national
entities. And this list doesn't include the many other
non-project related nested tables.
So if
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium
cannot be replicated pretty much as-is in wikicode
then I for will have a fit (I'm sure many others
will join me).
Yeah, that nested table is a nuisance. I'll have to
think about that.
There are two nested tables; the obvious one in the
isotopes section and the navigation nested table in
the first cell of the larger table (which in turn has
an image embedded in it). Both are necessary to the
functioning of the table and are not a "nuisance" at
all.
>An alternative solution is to only allow HTML
>syntax to be rendered if it is in a table:namespace
>page. As I said before, I want to eliminate the complexity,
>not just move it around. I want newbies to have some
>chance of being to edit the table as well as the
>prose around it.
>
Do you have /any/ idea about how much work would be
undone and have to be redone in a diminished format if
the document as is were implemented? Thousands of
pages will be broken and many users, including me, may
get fed-up with Wikipedia and leave.
A table is going to be dense and intimidating to
nontechnical users no matter what but tables are very
useful when it comes to effectively presenting tabular
data (something we have a lot of). Thus putting this
complexity on a separate page seems to be a good
compromise between preventing newbies from not being
intimidated by hordes of markup and allowing more
seasoned users the ability to present tabular data in
a table.
How the page functions for the reader is just as
important as how it functions for the writer. And just
as different writers have different abilities to
contribute prose to an article, we have different
coders with different abilities to add markup
to articles.
We don't dumb down the prose of articles to reach the
lowest common denominator reader/writer (except for
intro paragraphs) and we should not similarly dumb
down the markup just to make things a bit easier for
the lowest common denominator coder.
PS - We've seem to have done fine during the past 2+
years with tolerating HTML where it makes sense (such
as tables).
I want to put myself on the record as mostly supporting Mav's view on
this. I say this as a person whose knowledge of HTML can politely be
described as "limited" I have done a little work on some of the tables,
and that was a learning experience. If I worked on nested tables I
didn't realize that I was doing it. On the [[Fidel Castro]] article I
tried to figure out how to centre the caption under the picture of him
hugging the Chinese premier. I didn't succeed and by default it's still
left justified, but that's OK; that's consistent with the principle of
leaving something undone, and someone feeling inspired to make such a
minor adjustment will do it. I don't feel bad about my lack of success.
I've always avoided style sheets. They give me the feeling of somebody
trying to force me into his way of presenting things, even when I agree
that the style in question might be appropriate. Others will embrace
style sheets, and that's fine too -- for them!
To me dumbing down means depriving people of their own challenges in
life, and doing things for them that they should be doing for
themselves. Mothers do this all the time when they compulsively pick up
their children's things; the result is children who never learn to pick
for themselves - much to the irritation of their eventual spouses. The
educational component of Wikipedia is not just about content and the
process of making that content satisfy NPOV. The same process can also
apply to article stucture and markup. Need the Wiki vs. HTML dynamic be
any different than the one about American vs. British English.
Most of our edits must be and are with wiki-markup. That's good. It
serves most contributors well. If there is an option of using
Wiki-markup or HTML to accomplish the same thing then Wiki-markup
should definitely be preferred If someone has used HTML in an article
where I am working I'll make the change (if I understand it) but I'm not
going to whine and complain about somebody else's markup choice. It
worked. Having options for how we treat less frequent events gives more
room for growth.
Eclecticology