New Template: Variant table
I've created a new Template named Variant table to help us manage the new amount of dynamic content that has come out in the past year or so for Fallen London. The community has generally settled on tables to collect all of the textual or mechanical variations. This Template packages up the table syntax, and provides some important benefits for maintaining content on the wiki.
Features[edit]
Most significantly, cell content is wrapped in the Truncate template, so over-long text snippets will now be flagged like text in Description fields.
Second-most-significantly, wrapping the table in a template lets the table be used inside other templates. An oddity of Wikimedia syntax causes issues when tables are passed as parameters to templates. This meant that a lot of tables had to live at either the top or bottom of the page, which often wasn't the most logical place for them to live, and impeded readability & accessibility. This issue does not arise when a table is transcluded (via template or otherwise), so many tables can now be moved into Summary or Info fields, which is more logical.
As with any template, this also builds in best-practices like making the table collapsible and pre-collapsed. And if we need to fix something (like display on mobile, which I haven't tested at all), then there's a central place. It also adds a lot of categories which require a lot of typing to add by hand, and the Templates for which are not as well-known among the broader editor base. This template still takes a lot of typing, but some of the more rote stuff is automatic (e.g. Text Use categories).
Usage[edit]
See the template docs page. If anything is confusing or wrong there, tell me and I'll fix it.
Examples[edit]
I've updated three existing pages to replace existing tables with the Variant table template. This should let you all see how it works in practice, but if it needs to go back to the drawing board, it's not too many to back out.
Plan the next route across a ravine
Non-goals[edit]
This is not meant to replace every table on the wiki. In fact, it's mostly just meant to clean up the Board Meeting content.
Future Work[edit]
I have plans for "cumulative truncation." Currently each table cell has an independent 250-character text limit. But I think I can make that dynamic so that e.g. if the Description field uses 100 characters, then each cell in the subsequent table is limited to 150. But this is more complex and requires some updates to QuoteSummary as well.
It would be awesome if I could automatically wrap the table in tags, but that may be literally impossible in the wiki.
Feedback![edit]
Please do!
