digitescgraphlettermiscpunctundefMerging templates in Category:Character set table templates. Alright this TfD drafting is a bit factually wrong currently, because the chset-cell and chset-ctrl behave differently, but I can fix that. (Hopefully) I'll finish this up later. I still have to implement two (one?) final merged templates, but that should be extremely straightforward.
== Merging redundant templates ===
In the current template layout, all of the {{code|chset-cell}}, {{code|chset-ctrl}}, and {{code|chset-color}} could be merged into one template, with no loss in functionality and only slight changes in how they are used and backwards compatibility. I have a prototype merged version [[|here]].
With this in mind, there are now two paths forward:
#All of the templates get merged, which has the advantage that the template code is less likely to become outdated because all the code is in one place. All of the other templates become redirects.
#The code of certain templates is tweaked so they have distinct functionalities.
However the rest of the templates are to be handled, I'm very confident that all the {{code|chset-color}} templates should be part of one template; there's actual no advantage to having separate templates and separate templates cause more maintenance trouble than they're worth.
I'm in favor of option 1, since it will simplify everything and probably be the best route forwards for the future. If the separate templates did anything besides exposing different parameters from {{tlx|chset-cell-unified}}, I would be more in favor of allowing the {{code|chset-cell}} and {{code|chset-ctrl}} series templates to remain separate, but all of the templates in this series are identical aside from what parameters they allow the editor to access.
The only trouble I forsee is that the user script [LINK USER SCRIPT] will need updating. This shouldn't be too difficult in theory, but it may take some time, which might delay certain modifications near the end of the process.
Another possibility is for the user script to temporarily be disabled until it is updated, but that is probably not preferrable; the user script is higher priority than less templates for humans to deal with. ~~~~
chset-theme for two reasons:
|color= is confusing for those experienced with templates and HTML, because they might try to put an HTML color code or name directly in the parameter.