Template talk:Category

Needs some way to figure out when to break it into separate columns. Working on that.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 14:05, 19 September 2008 (EDT)

I haven't had the time to see what you're doing here, but judging by the example I guess you're making a template for a category listing. That's a pretty complex template, do you have any special plans for this? I'll take a look at the column distribution later, interesting problem.

--Qazaaq 08:04, 21 September 2008 (EDT)

Mostly I was looking at the Settings and Functions lists and was curious if I could automate that, since there are pages that attempt the same thing but less well. It was an interesting project, but I'm not sure how much better it can be done. Floats work left-to-right, top-to-bottom ("Z shaped"); the lists usually work top-to-bottom, left-to-right ("upside-down-N shaped"). Using tables doesn't work so well because it's nearly impossible to elegantly determine where to put the divisions; there's no way for the template to know how long a given column is because it has no knowledge of the length of the list. You could have the user specify where to do so, but unfortunately that would entail a hard-coded limit on the number of columns, which frustrates me as a programmer. Realistically, 5 would be the highest I could see it working, but nonetheless I'd prefer it not have that problem. *shrug*

Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:31, 21 September 2008 (EDT)