Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:10:48 UTC
Allow me to call into question, and perhaps leave here as a long term goal, MediaWiki's use of <table> for page layout, in pages like Special:Allpages. You are making assumptions about the user's device dimensions! Please use stylesheets etc.
...old fashioned and obsolete inline and table styles instead of CSS. If your site is still laid out with tables - WAKE UP! It means that your site’s layout is at least 5 years old and in the web and Internet world, it’s more like 50 years out of fashion. Your site is a ball and chain on the Internet... Seen in http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/26/site-optimization-optimizing-bandwidth-and-cleaning-out-the-code-closet/ Also see http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/ http://www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/ http://codex.wordpress.org/Styling_for_Mobile
Special:Allpages looks like tabular data for me. I see no reason to change unless someone creates nice solution that works with all browsers.
Nice to read: Håkon Wium Lie, CTO Opera Software: Wikipedia’s markup: a case study, http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
(In reply to comment #2) > Special:Allpages looks like tabular data for me. Ihe above URL, http://radioscanningtw.jidanni.org/index.php?title=Special:Allpages is _not_ tabular data. All it is is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 There is no relation between columns 1, 2, and 3. Maybe you are thinking about Wikipedia's Special:Allpages, but that is a special case, not a general MediaWiki case of Special:Allpages. With the obsolete hardwired tables design, one cannot browse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 or 1 2 3 4 5 6 or 1 2 3 4 All I know is you're wrong about it being tabular data. (But I don't know or use CSS so don't know what the modern redesign should be.)
I don't know of any way to do this that works in IE and doesn't require you to specify a fixed width. I don't think we want to degrade display for the majority of our users for the sake of a minority, even a more standards-compliant-browser-using minority. I guess we could do inline-blocks with a fixed width and rely on wrapping within each block. I think that would work. At least Firefox 2 doesn't support inline-block, so we might have to use floats for it instead, and specify both width and height or something (which would get pretty messed up for long page titles). Overall, this is nontrivial to do until we can rely on CSS column-*, which (surprise!) IE doesn't support, up to and including IE8.
. . . but if anyone has any ideas, feel free to submit a patch. Any proposal must work in IE6 and later, as well as any other significant browsers.
(Just adding URLs to this bug) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableless_web_design http://news.gmane.org/group/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/thread=98842/force_load=t/focus=98860
*** Bug 8234 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***