User talk:Xenocidic/UX

UX

I work with templates a lot. it's tough to teach an old dog new tricks. Rather than clutter up your templatespace, I figured UX would be an easy way to access my userspace as a templatespace. Is it OK if I restore it? It will only be a substing template and if "Template:UX" ever becomes necessary, we can repurpose it. –xenocidic (talk) 02:59, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

It seemed like it only existed so you could do your own custom welcome message. Again, why are we diverging from one welcome to two different welcomes? If the site's welcome can be improved, perhaps discuss or make improvements with that one, so Jim or others can benefit too, when they use it. I don't think it's helpful to have two or more welcome templates, or start doing welcomes two or more different ways. That's just good maintenance policy. --FeralKitty (talk) 03:26, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

No, and the reason that I'm doing things in my userspace is because I don't want to change things in the template space without your approval, because you might not like the changes I make. The changes to the welcome template will sign your name automatically and add a header. It will also hard code the person's username so it looks a little more personal. The changes should be implemented into Template:Welcome

Anyway, I've deleted all the templates I created except Template:Div (which I feel is very useful) and Template:= (I'm not sure if we need this, it was supposed to help with the internal linking to tabs but no dice). –xenocidic (talk) 03:48, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

The only time I had problems with some changes you made, where to the Navboxes where you rearranged and removed some things without consideration of the direction that we were moving in. Instead of "solving" how to avoid transcluding itself, you could have split the doc off as they were templates that hadn't been split, yet. Also the <center> markup that looked unnecessary was there for browser compatibility with older browser versions that wouldn't have have centered the table.

I have absolutely no problems with you editing templates, and if you have some helpful improvements for {{Welcome}}, feel free. It doesn't hurt, though, to discuss things, simply to make sure that we're all moving towards the same objectives (e.g. documenting templates, standardizing names and other such consistencies, improving performance, and modernizing the look and feel). As long as we don't introduce multiple ways of doing something, and the articles start taking different paths, I don't really have a problem, otherwise.

By all means, if you know better or more efficient ways to do things, I think that's a big help for us. I enjoy writing templates, and personally would like to know how things can be done better, so if you convince me of something, I'll be the first to adopt and use it, just as I had given {{div}} a shot, before it went 4 different ways. --FeralKitty (talk) 04:30, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough. It's just difficult to work on templates when they're includeonly'ing themselves - you cannnot preview the template because it's transcluding the saved version, rather than rendering the new changes. The categorization of the template is solved by simply wrapping the including categories with includeonly. Then the template will display itself (rather than transclude itself) when you are at the template's page, and the instructions can either be above, or below, depending on how you want it to look. But this isn't really a big deal if you like how you're doing documentation, I'll just have to temporarily remove the includeonly tags while I'm working on the template.

FWIW I think the new div should be a lot less processor intensive, uses single paramaters matching our css, and divclear would've been a great way to close tabs, but if you'd rather stick with <div class="pii_article_content_container"><div class="pii_article_classic_content"> in the code rather than {{div|article|classic}}, then we can, and I'll just use div to subst in the proper div markup.

Again, I'm a huge fan of templates, so if you don't mind, I'd like to restore Template:UX (or suggest to me another very short name that I can use in templatespace) so that I can subst stuff out of my userspace without cluttering templatespace. –xenocidic (talk) 04:47, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I understand that you can't preview it, I understand that you can wrap cats with includeonly, as we have done for quite some time. Before we went to split docs, I used some of those exact tricks you mention to let the template appear below the (inline) doc, when its output served as an example. And yes, when I really need to preview something in a split doc, I remove the includeonly too. So, I'm not sure that anything's being done wrong with a split doc approach. Since I knew we were going to move to a split-doc approach, I had intentionally includeonly'd those templates and transcluded them. Even with a split-doc approach, I would rather do things consistently, than not includeonly some, and play around with where I include the doc, merely to accomplish something clever.

I think we're working from two different directions. I use specific cut-and-paste templates with lots of information filled in (i.e., {{PlantInfobox}}). Why do I want to setup a second template just to hold that information, merely so I can subst it? I'd have two separate templates to maintain and template names to remember, instead of it being self-contained. While it may be a few seconds faster than cutting and pasting with the mouse, I don't think I want to add various custom species/plants/whatever shell templates into the template namespace, to save a few seconds when we discover a new plant or whatever.

As for the final point, it seems like you've already put it somewhere else, so that place is probably good enough, right? --FeralKitty (talk) 05:45, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Typing UX is a lot easier than typing User:Xen. You have your ways, I have mine. I've deleted all my templates except for div, which I suppose I will subst so we can have the div markup in the articles (though, see User:Xenocidic/Reddhott for an example of how it would play out) . Please let me have Template:UX, at least while I'm actively working here. Once things quiet down, I'll delete it. –xenocidic (talk) 05:58, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Sure, to save you from having to type six extra characters, and keep you happy, move it back.

As for your Reddhott example, I agree that it looks nicer, except for the unnecessary divclear comment :) But it's getting late, and we're going around in circles. To actually create something like that, you'd need to have subst'ed something... what we're seeing is how it would look, not how it was created. And to create it, we'd need a template to make species shells, similar to how {{div}} makes article shells for you. The problem is, as you've said yourself, that you end up with more and more templates, for more and more different types of articles, don't you? You like saving time, and it's fine for you if thousands of templates are the way of life. I'm trying not to see thousands of templates, when I list them, because when it's time to clean things up, as we'll have to do soon with the Image namespace, then you have to go though, one by one, and see what links here or whatever, and it's a maintenance/cleanup headache, in my opinion. But, if you can somehow do all these in your userspace, then I don't have to be concerned at all, when cleanup time rolls around, and there's less to look through, to see what's unused, been replaced, or obsolete. The point is, someone has to maintain all this code, and if you're not active here, down the road, I don't want to have to edit both an Infobox and a subst'ed template. Does that make sense?

(Again, we're consuming more time debating whether it's better to save time when creating articles, or save time maintaining the site, when I should really be working on the site.) Tell you what. If Jim says "My goodness, that's absolutely brilliant! I want us to subst everything like that," then we'll do it that way. Otherwise, if he's not going to use it and I'm not going to use it, I don't want to have to be the maintainer of it. Fair enough? :) Now, how about we shelf this discussion, so I can edit some articles, instead of writing replies :) --FeralKitty (talk) 06:25, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Sweet. As long as I have a way to fairly easily substitute content, I don't mind if we use div markup code directly in the articles - but transcluded (not subst'ed) {{div}} could work to create tabs and divclear could work to close them. Since most of the articles are already rolled out with divmarkup, let's continue with that. –xenocidic (talk) 10:47, 23 August 2008 (UTC)