User talk:Xenocidic/UX/link

Naming standards

May we give this a more specific/descriptive name? It might be a little ambiguous at this point, and we should also probably make room in the ns for other Link... templates.

You probably know the "Why is that command called dd? Because cc was already taken" story.

By the way, this is quite useful, thanks! List of minor characters had been needing this to get to the TV show tab. --FeralKitty (talk) 15:44, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

My main concern when naming it was something easy to type and remember. This template can always be expanded with other parameters rather than creating new templates. But feel free to suggest a better name. –xenocidic (talk) 15:48, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I understand that it can be expanded, but it probably shouldn't be overloaded (i.e., linking to tabs, vs. linking to things other than tabs). Names should also be easy to recognize. What does it link? Can I understand and/or distinguish its function when searching through the list of all templates?

Suppose I called a template Infobox, then you come along next month and want to copy over Wikipedia's Infobox? Merely trying to minimize future headaches/rearranging, that's all. Personally, though, I'd call it ln and be done with it ;) --FeralKitty (talk) 16:26, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I suppose I'm just not seeing other templates that might need to be named link for our purposes. It could be called linktab or ltab I suppose. link is just so easy to type and rememeber =), and most other things can be [[linked in the usual way]]. we could call it linktab leaving behind a redirect from link to make it easier. –xenocidic (talk) 16:42, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Leaving a redirect would just give us two files instead of one, producing more names in the list of templates. Let's forget about renaming this, and just move on, ok? :)

I know that stuff like vp2 is easy to type and remember, but perhaps that shouldn't be the criteria when we're trying to establish and/or stick to naming standards. If we just use short names for templates or images or class names, then at some point, it's going to get confusing, mixed up, and/or names are going to collide. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but 5 years down the road, when some other poor soul is trying to fit VP3 into the wiki, or worse, trying to debug a template, and they have to deal with a lot of [a-z][a-z][a-z0-9] "identifiers" that they didn't create, it's going to be a headache for them. Let's please not make their job harder simply to make our life easier.

Perhaps it's a good time to work on the naming standards, especially since we'll have over a thousand images being uploaded just for species alone. --FeralKitty (talk) 17:41, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Performance

The species articles are rendering 4-6x faster without this overhead. It still looks heavy parser use -- 60-80 calls/tab x 3-4 tabs -- is seriously affecting performance. Feel free to try it out and see if you see the same difference. If you want to undo my changes and try to optimize the code to see if it can be improved, go for it. Maybe try it without the #switch, and see if that makes a big difference.

Anyway, this was pretty much what was happening with Navbox, which is also fairly complex. Good luck! --FeralKitty (talk) 22:59, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

If you like we can use one template per type of link. {{linkvpc}} {{linktip}} {{linkjff}} {{linkvpp}} {{linktv}}. It would be really ideal if we could standardize the names for the tabs. to =Classic= =Trouble in Paradise= =Just for Fun= =Pocket Paradise= =TV show= for both species and articles, and eliminate the =TiP - Standard= bit. Nevertheless, once we have that sorted out, the link template should be subst:ed onto the navboxes –xenocidic (talk) 23:49, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

While it may be ideal for the templates, relabeling the tabs would not be ideal for the Reorg. Suppose VP3 also has Just for Fun mode. That would leave us in a lurch with two Just for Fun tabs under your naming scheme. --FeralKitty (talk) 02:29, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Yea, since all the species articles are already labelled, and the link template was a wash, we can leave 'em. oh, and for future proofing as you said. –xenocidic (talk) 03:15, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Linking to tabs

{{link}} now works, unfortunately the bold of the page you're on seems to break. (Test it out on the first two species of Template:Species-TroubleInParadise-Standard) I think it's an unfortunate tradeoff for the convenience of linking to tabs. What do you think of renaming the species-standard to just #Trouble in Paradise ? it would make things a little easier for internal link purposes, and the default target for the link template would be Trouble in Paradise so that people wouldn't have to supply a paramater to link to an article or species from VP2. –xenocidic (talk) 15:06, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

We'd be trading one annoyance for another annoyance. I know I definitely utilize bold to see where I am, without having to glance elsewhere. There's no solution that lets both work? As for renaming, are you talking about the tab (i.e., TiP - Standard -> Trouble in Paradise)? We use that tab label already for tabs that apply to both modes. I would think it would be confusing to mix conventions, wouldn't it? --FeralKitty (talk) 15:22, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

There might be a workaround, I can perhaps ask my wiki-wiz friend over at en.wiki if he can think of a better way. But if not, I think the convenience of linking directly to tabs outweighs the bold, at least for our readers.

As for the renaming, yes... I think the "Jff" tab is pretty self-explanatory what it's for, and I *think* most readers I think will be looking for standard information... (the just for fun crowd doesn't strike me as the wiki-crawling type). it's intuitive that "Trouble in Paradise" (just so) in terms of an article will apply to both , in terms of a species, will be standard and "Just for fun species information" disambiguates it. Not sure if I'm making sense. in any case, it makes linking directly to tabs a lot easier and with parameters to remember. –xenocidic (talk) 15:41, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

We use the convention in numerous places. Are we talking about dropping - Standard from, say, Navbox titles too, to be consistent with the tab? Also, how do you distinguish between a "Trouble in Paradise" tab that only applies to Standard, and a "Trouble in Paradise" tab that applies to both modes? Doesn't that create an ambiguity?

Having an either/or/both trinary also gave us the most flexibility for the style sheets. I'm not sure that we should move from a more flexible capacity to a more limited capacity. Still, I'll leave it up to Jim to see what he thinks. --FeralKitty (talk) 16:03, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll defer to yours and Jim's judgment on this one - I haven't gotten my feet wet enough to understand quite where the confusion would lie. I haven't been keeping up enough to know exactly what jff entails. –xenocidic (talk) 16:12, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

• woot new and improved link, now with 100% more bolding of the current article! does that work for ya? see Template:Link =) –xenocidic (talk) 17:29, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Kudos to you and/or your friend for the solution! :) Once we modify the style to match the internal link colors (so they appear as local links to visitors), that can be put to bed. I shall be grateful, every time I click on one of those links now. Well done! --FeralKitty (talk) 17:51, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I worked it out without thingg-vention but I'll try to get him over here anyway, he's an absolute genius with stuff like that. I can tuck the color that in the span tag, what's the correct color? –xenocidic (talk) 17:58, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

a {color: #002bb8;} a:visited {color: #5a3696;} a:active {color: #faa700;} --FeralKitty (talk) 18:37, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

• Here's what my friend said: Sorry for not getting back to you sooner; I was at the New York state fair yesterday... As to your question, I dunno man. I'm not sure if it's possible to fix it without modifying the MediaWiki software. The problem is the server is parsing the "=" symbol to its ASCII hexadecimal value of "3d" when it processes the internal link (MediaWiki apparently urlencodes all internal links before rendering the html) and at the same time, the server won't recognize a link to a page such as http://pinataisland.info/viva/Arocknid#tab%3dTV_show where the "=" is replaced with "%3d" because the "=" in this case is part of a server-side command ($_GET) that is processed before the "%3d" is parsed to display the "=". The only way I can think of to get around it is to use the full url of the tab. (GAAAA!!!!!!) sorry man, but I can't figure out any other way to get it to work. If it would help you, here's a link to the MediaWiki source code that parses internal links. Thingg⊕⊗ 20:22, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
  • I was thinking that maybe we can make Trouble in Paradise - Standard the default tab when the game launches. Thoughts? –xenocidic (talk) 20:27, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

That would be Jim's decision, although I wouldn't want to be the person to edit well over 100 articles just to move a tab section. Honestly, even if you move it, it wouldn't solve problems for people playing JfF or Pocket Paradise, so my feeling would be to keep the tabs in logical order, as they are now. --FeralKitty (talk) 20:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

ah, i thought maybe there would be an easier way. oh well. –xenocidic (talk) 21:14, 22 August 2008 (UTC)