Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia
Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery> markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.
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,_full_restoration.jpg)
Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery> to <gallery mode=packed> produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.
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In addition, the heights parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px> gives
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Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.
- Packed-hover (move your mouse over the images below)
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The captions
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appear when
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you
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mouse over
- Packed-overlay
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The
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captions
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are
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always there
It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.