On 4/5/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson(a)worldnet.att.net> wrote:
While people complain about the complexity which
templates have taken on
it is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between increasing
template complexity/functionality and decreasing article complexity.
Tables no longer have to be convoluted HTML or wiki-markup blocks in the
article themselves... they've been replaced by a short template call. And
conditional logic has made it so that the average user can insert one of
those templates into an article and fill out the parameters to produce a
perfect table without needing to understand the underlying table code at
all. That wasn't possible previously... they ''had'' to know table
markup
(or HTML) in order to edit tables.
I think this is the most important thing people need to understand
about template complexity: by making the *template* complex, we're
making the articles *simpler* and easier to maintain.
-L