Template talk:Messagebox

This is really ugly in practice. Can the width be set at individual usages please? ħuman 02:28, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

It's also a bad title for what appears to be a copyright notice box? ħuman 02:31, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I removed the various parameters to allow the css to take effect (you can also override the look in your personal css file). There's still a style parameter when you really want to change something, but the point is to make the look of all the various message boxes consistent. (e.g. the PD templates were all a mess of different formatting) -- Nx / talk 10:47, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

And I prefer these messageboxes to be wide instead of taking up a lot of vertical space and leaving unused space on the sides. -- Nx / talk 11:20, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Can you at least do that trick that limits them to 800px? IE, 80% if it's less than 800? And thanks for the dockymentation. ħuman 20:01, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

If you look at Template:Delete on a fairly wide screen, you'll see it's "half empty", we can do better ;) ħuman 20:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Restricting it to an arbitrary pixel size is not better, it is worse. I've been thinking about this a lot and I honestly think this is the best solution, even if it's not perfect.

One goal of this template is to make things consistent. That means all messageboxes would have to have a max width intended for Template:Delete, which would be bad for those templates that have longer text. -- Nx / talk 21:39, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Nx, a template the other day was fixed to be 80% with a maximum of 800 or wso px. It works fine and stops them from looking stupid on my monitor. Now, anyway, if you have "thought this through and think this is the best solution", can you at least share your thinking? All you're doing for me is making the site's template boxes look uniformly porly constructed. Why not even make the "max width" a parameter so they can be tweaked? I see no reason why all these templates should be the same width. No one's ever going to notice or care. ħuman 01:36, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

So noone cares is still a valid excuse around here?

I believe that's the Useful links template you are referring to (something I think should be vaped and replaced with something that is actually useful). I changed the fixed width to something that's not so horribly wrong, but still wrong. -- Nx / talk 03:02, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

You are still making no explanation other than "you prefer it". ħuman 03:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I've already given you the explanation. I want them to be consistent, which means it would have to be max-width:800 for every template, even when there's lots of text to fill the space.

Alternatively we can have each template have a random size depending on what mood you were in that day. -- Nx / talk 03:34, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Now you are just being an asshole. You are doing this because it's what you want, and you haven't explained. And you are just throwing poop with that "mood" comment, instead of actually explaining your reasons. "A foolish consistency..." Nx, this site is made by more people than just you, and you are revamping all kinds of carefully worked out boxes to meet some "need" you feel to make them all look the same. Please work with the other users as opposed to simply dictating your desires. ħuman 04:29, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

carefully worked out boxes That is an interesting term for ad hoc arrangement there. This give a single box that dictates the style of every box on the wiki. You change it once, you change them all. It builds a consistency across the whole site, makes it more professional. I don't know a journal that doesn't have a template for its articles. - π 04:35, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I've added a background image to offset the emptiness. How do you like that? -- Nx / talk 22:12, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

That is awesome. - π 22:17, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks even uglier to me. Can we at least reach some agreement on this before you smear what look like bad formatting all over the site? ħuman 01:38, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, bad formatting. And I suppose having dozens of templates, each with a different style and different code is good formatting? -- Nx / talk 03:02, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

If each one looks good on its own, yes, that's good formatting. I'm going to revert your wreckage of the sysop pledge again, because it's godawful ugly. ħuman 03:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Even if they looked good on their own (and they didn't), it would still be bad, and it is also bad to have a million different copies of the code instead of having it in one place. -- Nx / talk 03:34, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks great. I'd like to see a bit the lobe separation, though, to make it more clearly a slice of the brainz. ^{— Sincerely, Neveruse513 / Talk / Block} 22:22, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I kinda like it too, in fact I wonder if we could do something similar with our background? tmtoulouse 02:28, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I can't even tell what it is. All I see are some very light blue blurs? ħuman 03:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

You should get your monitor fixed as they are grey "blurs". - π 03:39, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Grey, blue, whatever. They are just blurs. They are so blurry I can't tell what color they are. ħuman 04:29, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It is a water mark version of the brain. - π 04:45, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, ok. I couldn't tell what it was/is at all. ħuman 04:49, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Nice have some consistency in the templates. --^{Ask me about your mother} 10:42, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know

I would like a 2px border, or a parameter to adjust it; although I do like the consistency it forces on everything. - π 03:45, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It's possible using a css class (see the mothball template for an example). Css is more efficient because you don't have to edit the template and reparse all the pages it contains. -- Nx / talk 03:54, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

That is okay. I guess if we ever want to change this template we should do it during a software upgrade when the server is off-line anyway. - π 03:58, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It's also possible to ask the site in general what they think of a project before going on a rampage of template editing. Possible, but, apparently, in this case, against character? ħuman 04:39, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I think it looks good, and I think consistency is a good idea. Then again, I'm no wiki connoisseur. Do you think conservapedia have your arguments on a RW WIGO? DeltaStar_{Senior Sysop}^{Speciationspeed!} 05:04, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

So, uh, if we ever think there is anything less than perfect about this template, we have to wait for a MW upgrade to fix it? Wow, nice work. OK, signing off before I say anything stupid. ħuman 03:08, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

how to make dashed outline

I just used this to remake Template:Troll, but how do I make a dashed outline using this template? ħuman 03:06, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Done. Added to MediaWiki:Common.css

.messagebox.mb-troll {
   border:medium dashed red;
}

Now you can use it any time you need it. - π 03:24, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Is there any chance we can build a help file or add to this templates docs in a way that any moron like me can understand it? In absentia 03:27, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

No problems. I'll do that when I get home this evening, I should be getting on with my realish work. - π 03:56, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

So the class parameter is an optional first parameter? (Sorry, but for the css novice—that would be me—it is confusing...) Sterile mini-chat-room-thingy 04:23, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Class is a named parameter, so it doesn't matter where you put it, and it also doesn't affect the numbering of the named parameters. So for example in {{some template|foo=spam|ham|eggs}}, the first parameter is "ham", the second is "eggs", and the foo parameter is "spam". You can also use {{some template|ham|foo=spam|eggs}} and {{some template|ham|eggs|foo=spam}} and the result will be the same. -- Nx / talk 12:45, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Works even better if I spell it right. CSS works on the parent-child node thing javascript does. All messageboxes have the class messagebox (you can use it for anything by the way, have a look at the top of my talkpage). You can add as many addition classes as you like. mb-troll is a class that only works under messagebox (the parent class thing), but mothball will work for all. All the CSS I know comes from a brief reading of this and monkey see, monkey do. - π 04:28, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Some thoughts

• This was never meant to replace everything remotely boxlike on the wiki. Because it has no inline style, you will either have to make everything look the same, or you will have to dump a lot of random stuff into common.css. Css is good for making it easy to change the style of a template without bogging down the server with a job queue of 10000. On a normal website avoiding inline style completely is good practice. On a wiki, it's impossible and undesirable. That said, we should use it more than we do now (e.g. the right side navigation templates, the bottom navigation templates, etc. see the point about templates below)
  • Also, using the brain watermark on everything remotely boxlike is overkill.
• The high-use warning does not mean "ye shall not edit it", it means be careful and don't ken too much.
• Fixed widths are evil. They don't allow the template to shrink, so on smaller screens it will simply go off the screen. Max-width is slightly better.
• Pixel sized fixed widths are the Antichrist. When Pi set the useful links to 725px he said "no words fall onto a new line". But they did on my computer, because the default fonts on Ubuntu are slightly different than Windows. That's why em was invented.
  • Even em is not perfect because fonts can have wider or narrower letters - here I suspect that on Human's computer the text did not break into three lines, yet it did on mine.
• max-width (with an em value) is not a good solution for Template:Delete, because:
  • it would make it a different size than the other templates
  • if you write a long enough delete reason there won't be so much whitespace
• We do need a more complex template system, to make it easier for people to make templates, and also to make their maintenance easier. For example, the right-side nav templates were all made by copying one ancestor template that had really stupid formatting. When I discovered this I had to manually clean up every single one. Ditto for userboxes (even though we have a nice userbox template that can do cool stuff like only cat your userpage and not the subpage you store userboxen on), where an unclosed span caused a lot of userpages to break with MW1.14's more sensitive parser. Then there's the infobox class, which has float:right, yet I've seen it used on stuff that shouldn't be right floated merely to get the colors, with an ugly hack to prevent that - a float:none would've done it, but the user didn't know that and did something really weird, which later broke when they wanted to change the formatting a bit.

-- Nx / talk 11:37, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

All good. In my defence the size I was arguing for was 70%, 725px was a compromise. - π 11:42, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

New idea

How about the copy-right messageboxes have a water mark of their copy-right logo where the brain use to be? - π 10:10, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Been there, done that -- Nx / talk 10:19, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

What was wrong? - π 10:21, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Looked bad, and there's a copyright symbol on most template already. -- Nx / talk 10:37, 17 December 2009 (UTC)