Template talk:Div

This is turning into a maintenance nightmare. If you can't decide whether it should be svp or svpc or vpc or vpcs, then perhaps it's not ready for live use.

The objective isn't to give you or me or other editors three or four different shorthands for the exact same div. We're already ending up with different live articles that use different abbreviations, depending on what the favorite spelling was at the time, and that's just not reasonable. While backward compatibility might be reasonable for 1.x to 2.x, after a template was in live use for an extended time, I don't see the point of supporting the earlier string ideas that transpired in the last day or so, from 0.1x to 0.4x.

Perhaps a good place to start is to look at the different class names in MediaWiki:Common.css. The object-game-qualifier style you see there isn't just a CSS naming convention, but one that is meant to be consistent across the wiki too, such as with templates and images:

• Template:Species-TroubleInParadise-JustForFun
• Image:Quackberry-TroubleInParadise-Wildcard-1.jpg

Since it appears that you're trying to compress classes into a 3-4 character string, you might want to look at some questions to consider:

• Are your parameter values consistent? In other words, do all "article" strings start with a... and all "species" arguments start with s...?
• Are you using a robust name for the game portion of the string? As suggested elsewhere, can your current scheme support VP3 JfF, down the road?
• How do you handle collisions in your shorthand? Suppose we added a wildcard object in addition to the weed object. If wtip means "weed_tip_content", what are you using for "wildcard_tip_content?"

I was willing to adopt this and give it a shot, but it looks like this is still in development, and you haven't finalized your values yet. It would be helpful, please, if you'd clean up any other live articles that have various iterations of svp or whatever, and switch them back to the original div markup, for now. In the future, let's try things like this out on Mousezilla or some other sandbox, first, until it's ready for adoption.

I'm going to catch up with whatever else is going on, then get back to my plant articles, and just use our longer conventional names. Once you feel this is robust and stable, Jim or I would be happy to take another look at this and see if it's ready for actual use. --FeralKitty (talk) 10:45, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking about this whole thing on the way into work and I think it's best if we just use the actual div code in the articles. They will be fairly stable and stay in location, and then the article won't require a template call. I've been bred to "not worry about performance" on en.wiki and performance is clearly something we need to be concerned about here. This template can still be used but it should be subst'ed. –xenocidic (talk) 12:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok. Why don't you go ahead and roll its use back out of wherever it's used then, please. I do think the articles looked "neater," and it was a good idea to try. Thanks for your work on it. --FeralKitty (talk) 12:47, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It's completely deprecated. I think that it might have utility as a subst'able template but for some reason it was subst'ing the entire code rather than just the code that matched the switch. Perhaps template subpages like div/vpc-article div/vpc-species, then when someone needed the div code they could just subst the appropriate subtemplate. but then we'll have an awful lot of templates. –xenocidic (talk) 13:06, 22 August 2008 (UTC)