User talk:Elf/Archive 1

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snoyes 00:25, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Howdy. I left a question over at Talk:Dog agility (I wouldn't normally also write here, but I figure you're new, and watchlists aren't super-effective at the moment). Oh, and welcome to wikipedia from me also. -- Finlay McWalter 00:45, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hi Elf, I'm one (of many) admins in Wikipedia, and just wanted to let you know I removed a comment on your User page "I have never been in the Marines." If this was indeed something you wanted on your page, please feel free to put it back in. The only reason I removed it was because the change was attributed to "64.173.9.44" and not to you, so I thought it might be vandalism. However, it might have been you were simply logged out and edited your User page. Welcome to Wikipedia, and feel free to ask if there is any confusion. Fuzheado 05:10, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I'm afraid there really aren't very good tutorials or standards for images, and most wikipedians are relative novices at HTML and particularly Cascading Style Sheets. The whole point of the wiki markup is that folks like this can produce nice pages, but there's a problem when the wikimarkup doesn't adequately capture enough functionality. On a related note, you'll see that almost all tables are implemented as HTML tables (which is an ugly, rather difficult syntax to use), although the latest version of MediaWiki does include some simple table markup. In the absence of decent "floaty thing" markup in wikimarkup, most people seem to copy image code from somewhere they know works (occasionally with ugly results). That's one of the little things I end up fixing whenever I encounter it. There's no substitute for experience, it seems ;( -- Finlay McWalter 22:06, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)

with regard to formatting the different exercises on dog agility, I think what you have looks fine (better than many pages). Alternatively, you could make each exercise a sub-heading (with three = s instead of two), or you could encode them into some kind of table (the table markup, I've discovered, is described on the "meta" wikipedia at MediaWiki User's Guide: Using tables - but I've never used it). But don't sweat the format too much - information is what people come here for. -- Finlay McWalter 22:11, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There is a stylesheet, but it doesn't seem to be officially documented, so I think one shouldn't make reference to it in an article. Mediawiki (the software that runs wikipedia) does take out several HTML tags (and scripts and stuff) but it leaves in "style" directives. So this means one can use CSS, but one can't really reference a stylesheet (which kind of defeats the purpose of CSS). Thus you'll see only very small uses of CSS, almost entirely to do with floating tables and graphics. -- Finlay McWalter 12:46, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC)