![]() | Television Template‑class | ||||||
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There are show's seasons with more than one release per season ("Volume 1" and "Volume 2"). It would be required to have a "more complex" table, with parameters like Title2, Set details2 and Special features2 etc. e.g.: Glee (season 1). Thank you — Artmanha ( talk) 23:57, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm going to suggest something pretty radical for this template: completely removing the table structure, for better WP:ACCESSIBILITY, especially on mobile.
If you've ever looked at a page that uses this template on a small-screen device like a phone, you know that the formatting is... well, IMHO, not great. (If you haven't, here's how the template transclusion in the Clone High article looks on my Galaxy S6: Screenshots hosted at Imgur.)
This is an issue that applies to a lot of templates, not just this one, which I'm acknowledging as all the more reason to start with this one. This particular template is relatively rare in that the table structure really adds nothing to it. The information could just as easily be formatted — in fact, might be better formatted, even in desktop browsers — as simple wikitext/wikilists. (Also, it's only used on 54 articles, so it's not a major impact to change it.)
So, my proposal is simple. A reformatting such that this:
Doctor Who: The Complete Eighth Series | |||||
Set details | Special features | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| ||||
DVD release dates | |||||
Region 1 | Region 2 | Region 4 | |||
9 December 2014[1] | 24 November 2014[2] | 19 November 2014[3] |
becomes, instead, this:
There's room for some debate about the heading structure, and the levels should probably be made adjustable for maximum flexibility, but that's the basic idea. It's slightly longer on desktop, but not excessively so. (My browser renders the table at 450px tall, whereas the list version is 600px tall. The table structure itself takes up more height than you'd think, and you lose any savings from the shorter length of "Set details" compared to "Special features".) The advantage, though, is that it's significantly more readable on a narrow-screen device. And it loses none of the information from the table except for the outdated, purely decorative background |color=
parameter for the title row.
Some anticipated potential questions, with my responses:
That's the far thornier question, isn't it? I agree that would be another possible solution to the mobile-formatting problem, and makes a lot of sense for more complex tables that do have valuable structure worth preserving. But in this case, the table really adds as little to the desktop rendering as it does to the mobile rendering, so why preserve it at all? Also, if a CSS solution to this issue was likely to come around, it would've already.
A magical, wiki-wide CSS solution is unlikely anyway. Responsive table layouts would likely have to be coded on a case-by-case basis, even if they were to become an option. In this case, I genuinely feel the best solution is to do away with the unnecessary table.
There's a sense in which that applies to literally every template transclusion on Wikipedia, if you really think about it. (In fact, until a few hours ago the article I took my screenshots from, Clone High, was manually building its own table of information. I'm the one who made the edit to move that information into a standardized template transclusion instead.)
The point of template transclusion is to standardize the formatting and handling of the data passed in, for repeatability and simpler article coding, and so that changes and enhancements (whether to layout, formatting, or processing) can be made centrally and apply to all transclusions. All of that still holds as true. There's really no reason at all that the standardized formatting/layout has to involve a table.
-- FeRDNYC ( talk) 11:49, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
![]() | Television Template‑class | ||||||
|
There are show's seasons with more than one release per season ("Volume 1" and "Volume 2"). It would be required to have a "more complex" table, with parameters like Title2, Set details2 and Special features2 etc. e.g.: Glee (season 1). Thank you — Artmanha ( talk) 23:57, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm going to suggest something pretty radical for this template: completely removing the table structure, for better WP:ACCESSIBILITY, especially on mobile.
If you've ever looked at a page that uses this template on a small-screen device like a phone, you know that the formatting is... well, IMHO, not great. (If you haven't, here's how the template transclusion in the Clone High article looks on my Galaxy S6: Screenshots hosted at Imgur.)
This is an issue that applies to a lot of templates, not just this one, which I'm acknowledging as all the more reason to start with this one. This particular template is relatively rare in that the table structure really adds nothing to it. The information could just as easily be formatted — in fact, might be better formatted, even in desktop browsers — as simple wikitext/wikilists. (Also, it's only used on 54 articles, so it's not a major impact to change it.)
So, my proposal is simple. A reformatting such that this:
Doctor Who: The Complete Eighth Series | |||||
Set details | Special features | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| ||||
DVD release dates | |||||
Region 1 | Region 2 | Region 4 | |||
9 December 2014[1] | 24 November 2014[2] | 19 November 2014[3] |
becomes, instead, this:
There's room for some debate about the heading structure, and the levels should probably be made adjustable for maximum flexibility, but that's the basic idea. It's slightly longer on desktop, but not excessively so. (My browser renders the table at 450px tall, whereas the list version is 600px tall. The table structure itself takes up more height than you'd think, and you lose any savings from the shorter length of "Set details" compared to "Special features".) The advantage, though, is that it's significantly more readable on a narrow-screen device. And it loses none of the information from the table except for the outdated, purely decorative background |color=
parameter for the title row.
Some anticipated potential questions, with my responses:
That's the far thornier question, isn't it? I agree that would be another possible solution to the mobile-formatting problem, and makes a lot of sense for more complex tables that do have valuable structure worth preserving. But in this case, the table really adds as little to the desktop rendering as it does to the mobile rendering, so why preserve it at all? Also, if a CSS solution to this issue was likely to come around, it would've already.
A magical, wiki-wide CSS solution is unlikely anyway. Responsive table layouts would likely have to be coded on a case-by-case basis, even if they were to become an option. In this case, I genuinely feel the best solution is to do away with the unnecessary table.
There's a sense in which that applies to literally every template transclusion on Wikipedia, if you really think about it. (In fact, until a few hours ago the article I took my screenshots from, Clone High, was manually building its own table of information. I'm the one who made the edit to move that information into a standardized template transclusion instead.)
The point of template transclusion is to standardize the formatting and handling of the data passed in, for repeatability and simpler article coding, and so that changes and enhancements (whether to layout, formatting, or processing) can be made centrally and apply to all transclusions. All of that still holds as true. There's really no reason at all that the standardized formatting/layout has to involve a table.
-- FeRDNYC ( talk) 11:49, 28 February 2019 (UTC)