Difference between revisions of "Template talk:Function"

Template talk:Function (edit)

Revision as of 18:24, 20 April 2009

3,416 bytes added , 18:24, 20 April 2009

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→‎Templates considered harmful

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+==Templates considered harmful==
+I realise I'm coming in very late on the discussion: after the decision's already been made, in fact.
+How much advantage do templates give in management terms? Any more than a regex search-replace would give? Looks to me like templates are there because they might, at some point in the future, provide a hypothetical advantage to administrators.
+Their main real effect at the moment appears to be to intimidate and confuse users.
+Take me for instance: I've been programming for quarter of a century; professionally for 15; I know more programming languages than will fit on my résumé; and I am already juggling ten languages in my work, and another half dozen or so in my free time.
+So I look at a templated page, see it looks like line noise or some bastard son of lisp, and think "...nah. Maybe some other day," and close the edit box. I don't ''need'' or ''want'' to learn another language, just to edit a webpage!
+So, to my point: I'm a professional (by at least some measures), and yet ''I'' am daunted by the idea of having to learn yet another language just to edit a wiki. How much worse must it be for regular users?
+How are templates bad? Let us count the ways...
+* They are intimidating and offputting.
+* They prevent use of the skills of readers. Most people clicking the edit button will have existing, wiki-editing skills, but faced with a template, these skills become essentially useless: they can't edit the page without fear of screwing it up.
+* Templates are for machines, not for pages maintained by people. We've seen that people editing templated pages assume that it's wrong, and correct it to proper wiki style; I feel that is both natural, and arguably correct to do so once a page becomes hand-maintained.
+* Templates are obfuscated, which is ''really'' bad style. Even code you write for yourself should be readable by all, and that is infinitely more important for code that you want other people to read and maintain, without training or pay. Could your grandma understand <nowiki>{{{{{ThisAtrocity}}}}}</nowiki>?
+* Apparently templates can only affect the beginning of the page, so instead of making the page layout logical, you have to shoehorn the data to fit the template, squooshing what should be footer date into the header (I feel moderately confident that there must be solutions to this one).
+* They break page histories, since historical pages which used a different version of the template or other transcluded pages are "lost" and the original look of the page cannot be regenerated from the page history.
+* They cause invisible dependencies in that if a user changes a template to fit better with one page, they may inadvertently break several hundred other pages.
+* And they have been known to kill puppies and kittens.
+* Even ''proposed'' templating discourages editing. I'm certainly not going to bother editing any more function pages before I've got to grips with the template, because it's just a royal waste of time if they're only going to need rewriting. And I can't imagine many people feeling differently.
+Well, just a thought, and opinion. If templates are here to stay, then I'll accept it, learn the language, and use them. But I've got a million other things to do, it's low on my priority list, so I may never get round to it. And the function pages are off my list of possible ways to procrastinate until then.
 ==Testing==
 I added the template to [[GetAnimAction]]. As far as I'm concerned we're ready to put it to use on all function pages.