Index talk:Horses and roads.djvu

Question and comments

Question one: formatting

What's the policy for formatting codes here?

1. is use of plain HTML welcome, or use of templates is preferred?
2. is it recommended to use existing, standard templates, or is some creation of new templates appreciated?
3. in the case that new, test templates are welcome, does this community like that they are put into nsTemplate, or it's better to create them into a user subpage?
4. is any of you exploring div + style tricks as an alternative to html tables?
5. is some of you using the "poem + center" trick I used into Page:Horses and roads.djvu/7? Do you see any drawback of such a trick, that makes unnecessary to add lots of br tags?

Hi Alex. I'll give you an opinion:

1. Templates are frequently used, I believe they make the text easier to read when correcting. They also have supporting documentation, and all the other advantages.
2. It very likely that the problem has been encountered, and a template produced. Category:Formatting templates has most of these.
3. Most work needs to be on merging and tweaking the existing templates.
4. Look inside the templates, and at their /docs
5. I use {{Larger}}, {{smaller}}, and {{center}} for title pages. Using one or two empty lines to separate the lines of the page will give a good result, exact font and line height are not significant. You might have a look at texts on the main page to get some ideas. cygnis insignis 14:39, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I was just browsing category:Formatting templates... they are really a number. :-) --Alex brollo (talk) 14:54, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Question two: splitting chapters/sections and linking

1. Horses and roads could be splitted into a relatively small number of large chapters, or into a large number of brief sub-sections of the individual chapters. Which is the preferred policy about?
2. Page links connect transcluded ns0 page to source nsPage pages. Is there some trick to obtain the reverse link - from individual Page: pages to their ns0 transclusion (we call this "cross-linking" in it.source)?

--Alex brollo (talk) 14:20, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

1. There is no policy on that. A very large page may cause problems to some users, dividing into chapters is logical, but fiddly if they are very small. Some sites have a whole book on one page, that is convenient for reading and searching - once you have downloaded it.

OK, I'll build "large" chapters. Considering too, that they are large for html content, but usually they are very short dealing with their wiki code (thanks to ThomasV and his beautiful pages tag!)

1. This has been proposed, but it never went ahead. Some pages may appear in two place, if they are sections, but that is another reason to avoid making small subpages. The page in the sidebar "What links here" is my way of getting the 'reverse link', it is very useful here. cygnis insignis 14:55, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps you'll be interested into our it:Template:Ns0, that we begin to use as a cross-link between Page: and Ns0: namespaces. This is a very promising field for automation; the two parameters of the template, added to the other implicit "positional" data (containing page, position into the code of the page), are all what is needed to a willing, well tamed bot (as you see I like horses..) to add section tags by itself and to build the whole code of Ns0: pages. The Ns0 template is put just at the beginning of the chapter, so that sometimes a page contains more than one Ns0 template, any one pointing to different Ns0 subpages. Take a look to it:Indice:Poesie (Carducci).djvu for an example. The summary list into the index page is built by a bot using Ns0 explicit and implicit data, and data coming from pagelist tag too. Cross link are shown as small open book icons. --Alex brollo (talk) 16:36, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Question three: naming of section

I saw into the proofread I read that here sections are given a unique name into the whole book. On the contrary, for automation purpouses too, I always name 1 the first section into the page, 2 the second one, and so on. Is your policy based merely on convention, or there's some other sound reason that I can't guess? --Alex brollo (talk) 16:36, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Some automation uses s1 and s2, I use that and never need more than two sections. Some individual nsPages are divided in more sections than that, even one or two sentences, so naming the label after the section is probably easier. cygnis insignis 16:48, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Experimental {{Ns0}} use

I created an "experimental template", Ns0; you can it at work into Page:Horses and roads.djvu/17. It doesn't output anything into Ns0; it outputs a small link floating on the lef into nsPage. --Alex brollo (talk) 22:29, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Question four: analytical index

Last pages of the book contain a detailed index of contents. Now, I can build a system of anchors and links working both in Page and Ns0 namespace, with one template and one "data page", accepting two parameters only (the anchor, t.i. the entry of the index, and the number of the page); but I'd like to avoid to "discover warm water", as we say in Italy. It there some example to learn from? And - is there something like it:Template:§, that builds an "invisible anchor" that is highlighted when it works as a target of a link? It would be useful here. But if there's not, consider that it only runs adding a row of code into Common.css. --Alex brollo (talk) 22:38, 5 September 2010 (UTC)