Misplaced Pages

NavigationBox

I love what you've done with {{NavigationBox}}!!

• Thanks, Markles. Personally I prefer using a bullet in Navigation boxes. For an example, see {{Tufts_Presidents}}. However, if I had to choose between commas and the pipe character, I would opt for the comma. I also much prefer having the font larger than what Jack Cox is forcing on the rest of us. His font is just a little too small to read, and your font size appears to be the standard. I've been following the edit/reversion wars he's been waging against you and I am almost always am on your side. It does not please me that he seems so unwilling to compromise or let anyone else edit "his" templates. Let me know if you ever need any help and I'll be happy to lend my opinion to a discussion or help make necessary changes. Keep up the good work! --CapitalR 10:58, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Act of State Doctrine

hey thanks for your comment on my Act of State Doctrine page, i appreciate it. Thanks again, Thetruthbelow 14:58, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I award you the Minor Barnstar

Tufts University Infobox

I saw you were trying to prevent our place-name from wrapping onto two lines. Rather than inserting an additional table in our instance of the infobox I went ahead and edited the template and inserted nbsp's into the place name to prevent it from ever wrapping. We'll see if other users of the template prefer their place name on a single line as well... —Jnk 15:25, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

• Hi Jnk, I was actually only using that code in the infobox to widen it to be 250px, the same as the picture below the infobox, and the standard width for many different infoboxes relating to Massachusetts articles (and so it doesn't look so squashed). The code you put in to {{Template:Infobox University}} basically accomplishes the same thing, and it looks good. Hopefully users of the infobox from other schools won't mind the change. --CapitalR 18:08, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Modifications to NavigationBox

Hi CapitalR, just a veeery quick question. As promised I'll follow up in the next days (when I'll also make a cleanup of the whole discussion). Could please tell me what the purpose of padding: 0em 0em... and then again 0em (;-)) is? (BTW, I think Misplaced Pages should have coding guidelines. I hate when people just remove a semicolon and says "removed unnecessary code" in the edit summary) --Gennaro Prota  18:44, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• On some versions of Firefox, the template looks very weird without the padding line in there (the padding for some reason defaults to a large value giving a large border around the title). As for the semicolons, having them in there or not doesn't really bother me. I don't ususally remove them when other people put them in, but User:Markles likes to get rid of them to simplify the code. I tend to put them in at the end of style statements just out of habit, and don't mind that others remove them. --CapitalR 20:52, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Some of this text is copied from User talk:Gennaro Prota

Hi CapitalR, thanks for your fixes. I was just wondering what browser you are using: I ask because the center element shouldn't be needed (in fact everything works, without it, on Firefox 1.5.0.3) --Gennaro Prota  09:04, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• Hi Gennaro Prota, thanks for helping with Template:NavigationBox. As for the edits I made to it after you:
  • I use Internet Explorer for my contributing, which doesn't require the center tag here. I put back the center tag just in case any other browser out there required it.
  • You seem to have deleted the margins before and after the template. When an article has more than one NavigationBox in a row, they would have no space between them at all. Thus, I had to put back in the margin settings we had before you changed the template.
  • As for margins for the "List" area, they were lopsided when you changed them (too much on top, too little on the left and right), so I evened them out.
  • For the image, you removed the part "width=1", which caused problems when the "List" area was short. The image would take up more space than it should have, making the template look funny. I put that piece of code back in to correct the problem. Essentially, this code keeps the border around the image tight.
  • Finally, I changed the font back to 90%, which is what was agreed upon a while ago through discussion on various related templates.
  • Let me know if you have any other questions, --CapitalR 09:19, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks for the exhaustive reply. I'll give a quick answer as I spent all night editing and need some rest :) But I'll get back to you. About the first two issues:
  • I intentionally removed the center tag, as it is deprecated, as you know. Maybe we could have waited and see *if* someone had problems without it
  • By "in a row" you mean "in a column"? :) I removed top and bottom margin because I think only the "calling context" can know what they should be. From within the template, we don't have info about "the surroundings", so to speak, so we can't decide.

(to be continued...)

--Gennaro Prota  09:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• Hi again Gennaro Prota.
  • As for the center tags, it turns out you do need them in IE (or some other method of centering other than the center tag). Without them the NavigationBox templates are all slightly to the left of center. Thus, we need to keep the tag in there for now (or find another way of ensuring center-ness).
  • As for my point #2 above, I meant when you use multiple NavigationBox templates one after the other in an article. For example, the following shows two templates with and without the margin correction I put in (of course, no article actually calls these two particular templates one after the other, but some templates do use multiple NavigationBox templates in a row, such as Tufts University) The code for the templates one after the other in an article would be as follows:

{{Public colleges and universities in Colorado}}
{{Public colleges and universities in Connecticut}}

• • First, without the margin correction:

• • As you can see, this is a problem because there's no space between them. The following shows my corrected version:

• • Above, you can see the small space between the templates which makes it look much better. I think these margins make it very convenient to not have to worry about spacing when calling this template.
  • The next example shows a template without the "width=1" correction in it for the image:

• • And now with the "width=1" correction to the image:

• • Clearly there's a problem with the first image above because the borders aren't tight around it (at least using Internet Explorer). The "width=1" fix corrects this problem (even though it looks kind of funny in the code).
  • I hope this helps. Keep asking more questions if you like, --CapitalR 09:51, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi CapitalR, and sorry for the very late reply. I believed I had still to answer about some points above but upon re-reading the whole discussion it seems to me there's nothing to add. If you agree I would do some cleanup here and on the corresponding template discussion page. --Gennaro Prota 23:32, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• • Hey again - everything in the template now looks great and it all seems to be working smoothly. Thanks for helping with the updates and fixes. --CapitalR 00:31, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
    • Thanks to you. It's a pleasure to work with kind and helpful people. --Gennaro Prota 00:49, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Extra "|"?

What does the extra "|" do in the parameters? That is, {{{Title|}}} instead of {{{Title}}}? —Markles 20:08, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• It's needed for the optional parameters of the navigational box. I noticed that some of the athletic conference nav boxes came up with the text "{{{Image}}}" where an image should be. That was fixed by replaceing {{{Image}}} with {{{Image|}}}. The same thing should be done for the other non-required parameters. I just took it out of Title and List (i.e. reverted them back to {{{Title}}} and {{{List}}}, even though it doesn't matter. The pipe after the variable name is used for default values. For example, if you use {{{Image|default.jpg}}} in a template, and pass the template a value for the Image variable, then the pipe isn't used. However, if you don't pass that template a value for Image, then the Image variable will default to default.jpg. By using {{{Image|}}} in the template, it sets the value of the variable to nothing if no value is passed. Thus, in the athletic conference navigation boxes, if the Image variable isn't set, it will default to being blank instead of being the text "{{{Image}}}". I hope that made sense, ask me again if my explanation wasn't clear. --CapitalR 20:27, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

The question of template categorization

As you might have noticed, I've been categorizing navigational templates (along with anything else I happen to come across in my search). It is a huge relief to know that someone is keeping an eye on things.

Of course, I can't keep doing these categorization blitzes. This is something more people should know about, so that the process can become more autonomous.

As a result, I want to figure out a more complete category scheme for templates, to be displayed at a prominent place at some point. (A number of templates I've seen don't seem to fit into any existing categories at this point, or would benefit from additional categories.) Interested in starting a discussion about this somewhere? Any thoughts as to where might be an appropriate forum that would gather the most input? (I considered a WikiProject at one point, but some types of projects just tend to gather dust... and this seems to fall into that group.) –Unint 21:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

• I couldn't agree more that we need a place for a discussion about template categorization and organization. I'm currently out of town for a little while, but I'll think about different options and let you know soon. Keep up the good work. --CapitalR 02:51, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• I'm in the process of going through all 43,000 templates in English Misplaced Pages to determine which ones are uncategorized navigational boxes. I'm using a few bots to help (all are offline bots using database dumps). The results are posted at User:CapitalR/Uncategorized navigational boxes if you want to help me categorize them. This is a very slow process, even with bots to help, so the list will grow each day for the next few weeks. Let me know what you think of the list, or if you know a better place to put it than my userspace. --CapitalR 23:06, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Wow. This could take quite a while. Let's see...

I honestly don't imagine that we'll get a prompt response even if we put this on a supposedly more "public" page (this is after the last WikiProject I was involved in with categorization as a major focus slowly froze over). Or am I being overly pessimistic? In any case, I like to imagine that people who are actually interested in this will be savvy enough to find it by following the Wiki trails.

I believe that every navigational template category should have a "template by article category" as a supercategory, so as to account for the various topical templates that are not navigational (infoboxes, say). As for those, I'm currently trying to think of a good name for a category of article text-generation templates, which as far as I can tell don't have a category at all.

Should we come up with a tree of topics before sorting? (I've been afraid to touch Cat:Navigational templates by region for fear that it'll all fall apart when I discover something else that's regional but not continental or national.) Looking at the first page, I see:

• Weapons
• Political figures by nation
• Hurricanes
• Military vehicles
• Sports by event
• Sports by nationality
• Highways
• Literature by author
• Subjects by fictional universe
• Television shows
• Television stations by region
• Aircraft
• Airlines
• Airports
• The Bible
• Biochemistry
• Local features by region
• Pharmacology
• Succession templates (These are going to need their own "by article category" categories soon...)

...This list is not going to be finishable right just now.

I have AWB access, but it hasn't been working out for my purposes. For example, I can't seem to get it to generate a list of templates linked to from, say, a WikiProject page; it only caught article space links. So I use Google searches and manual editing, since I've found that I'm more comfortable with opening up multiple tabs in Firefox at once than going through a list one at a time. –Unint 00:44, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

RE Source code

Sure, if you send me an email then I can reply to it with the code attached. I will warn you that it is pretty messy, but simple enough to understand probably. Martin 18:07, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

{{93}}

Why was that moved? I don't see the point. ---J.S (t|c) 22:00, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

• I moved it because the title "93" has to meaning to anyone unfamiliar with Thelema (including me, until I read the article on Thelema and figured out the significance of 93). Since the template was about Thelema and not about just the number 93, the new title of {{Thelema}} just made a lot more sense. Also, it is now similar to other religion and philosophy navigational templates, which are all named after the religion/philosophy itself. Lastly, when searching a category for something related to Thelema, one would expect to look under the heading "T" instead of "9". --CapitalR 23:21, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Senate templates

Would you mind providing me (at my talk page) a full list of these Misplaced Pages:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 May 24#Senate templates that need deletion? Circeus 03:31, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

• They are as follows:
  • {{89th Senate}}
  • {{90th Senate}}
  • {{91st Senate}}
  • {{92nd Senate}}
  • {{93rd Senate}}
  • {{94th Senate}}
  • {{95th Senate}}
  • {{96th Senate}}
  • {{97th Senate}}
  • {{98th Senate}}
  • {{99th Senate}}
  • {{100th Senate}}
  • {{101st Senate}}
  • {{102nd Senate}}
  • {{103rd Senate}}
  • {{104th Senate}}
  • {{105th Senate}}
  • {{106th Senate}}
  • {{107th Senate}}
  • {{108th Senate}}
  • {{109th Senate}}
  • Hope that helped --CapitalR 08:50, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Thank, all deleted now. Circeus 12:22, 3 June 2006 (UTC)