User talk:Gphemsley

Breadcrumbs

I can't seem to tell without a scorecard whether I should be adding or removing breadcrumbs... maybe add them on odd-numbered days and remove them on even? I don't have strong feelings either way, but we need one consistent standard! Dan Tobias (talk) 22:06, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I find the layout of the formatInfo box awkward and the breadcrumbs better visually. I have been making both, but have been seeing breadcrumbs removed. Is there a way to apply two categories at the same level in the formatinfo box? For example, GeoTIFF should be both Graphics and Geospatial. I have only found out how to apply Geospatial as a subcategory of Graphics. swanQ (talk)

@Dan: Once I added the ontology to the infobox, I stopped adding adding breadcrumbs to pages; I can't control what other people do.

@swanQ: There are two issues here. One is the fact that breadcrumbs imply a navigational hierarchy that can fall apart, e.g. when you have a format that falls into multiple categories. The other issue is that the breadcrumbs (as they are currently formulated) provide no way to track their use or attach additional semantics to them. Using a template such as Template:FormatInfo is a way to rectify that. Now, I admit that the template in its current form does not support having multiple categories—but the beauty of using a template is that you can change it once and immediately have the change be propagated to all pages that use it. You cannot do that with the breadcrumbs, which are currently just a simple table. The way I designed the infobox was inspired by the many infoboxes on Wikipedia, such as those used for species or languages. However, those mostly do not have to deal with multiple hierarchies. We will need to come up with a solution for that, which we can discuss someplace like Template talk:FormatInfo. A couple of options: (1) modify FormatInfo to allow multiple hierarchies; (2) create a separate template for breadcrumbs or another representation of hierarchy that we can then use on pages. I don't know what the best solution is. Gphemsley (talk) 19:30, 13 November 2012 (UTC)