Category talk:Wikipedia formatting and function templates

This category was nominated for merging on 28 May 2024. The result of the discussion was merge.

New template requested — Discreet abbreviation

See this discussion. A screen reader does not pronounce “Avg.” correctly. How can it know that the expected pronounciation is the one of “Average” ? No way. I had added the abbreviation template necessary for accessibility. Someone had reverted my art because s/he saw “dots” under the text and thought something was broken.

On the French Wikipedia, I often use the discreet abbreviation template. Look at these templates :

Both of these templates make the abbreviation accessible : the screen reader can read the entire word(s) instead of the abbreviation, which is often unspeakable. For people lucky enough to have at least one hand and a mouse, when they fly over the abbreviation a question mark appears, as well as the meaning of the abbreviation. The abbreviation template underdots the abbreviation. The discreet abbreviation template does not.

I like the discreet abbreviation template : people who know the abbreviation's meaning or who don't care are not disturbed by dots, and people who wonder what the stuff means fly on it and get its meaning.

The discreet abbreviation template is cruelly missing to the English Wikipedia.

Please, someone good at creating templates, make it !

Thanks.

--Nnemo (talk) 22:17, 24 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've created it at Template:Discreet abbreviation by copying the template from the French Wikipedia, but the dots are still there. I think class=abbr here may be different than that on the French Wikipedia. I tried <abbr class="abbr" title="average">avg</abbr> on the French Wikipedia, and it displayed fine. Here it still has the dots: avg. Goodvac (talk) 23:55, 24 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see that there's a problem. If an abbreviation is used then it should be marked up as an abbreviation, and there is a template {{abbr}} to make it easy to do. As Nnemo says it is necessary to mark up abbreviations properly for accessibility. If someone has a problem with the way their user agent displays abbreviations, then they need to take their problem to MediaWiki talk:Common.css and make a case for a class which hides the way their browser displays abbreviations – which is exactly what has happened on the French Wikipedia. In the meantime, I expect that some editors may need to have it politely explained to them that they ought not to be reverting edits which correctly mark up abbreviations as abbreviations – IDONTLIKEIT is not a good reason to be ignoring accessibility. --RexxS (talk) 01:32, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly what RexxS said, in all particulars. And also, BTW, the discussion here and especially the template should use the word "discrete" (similar spelling to the French word). The word "discreet" means we're trying to keep it a secret. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 05:52, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

John, are you a native anglophone ? I am not. I know the word discrete : separate, especially in maths, discrete values. I am pretty confident that the appropriate word here is discreet : quiet, calm, light.

--Nnemo (talk) 21:12, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am a native anglophone. "Discreet" is right. The idea is to "keep it a secret", or more precisely, to not announce it so obviously. --142.205.241.254 (talk) 22:31, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, then, I misunderstood your intention with the template. I thought you wanted to get to a separate, specific abbreviation for "avg." (and other examples). Guess I skimmed too fast. Carry on, then. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 01:49, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Version of User:Nnemo has some errors (old + new), including incorrect view of the section of Year [1]. Optional subtitles of avg etc are option, but doing it for errors in the template is unintentional vandalism. Absolutely not, you can add optional options, introducing errors in the template. Subtropical-man (talk) 20:51, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

“Unintentional vandalism” is a funny phrase when you know wikipedians. ;-) There is no such thing as unintentional vandalism. Which “errors” about year ? If there are any, they exist both after my last change and before my last change. And speaking of errors, Avg and Dec are not English words. If we keep the abbreviations, they need to be correctly marked up, for accessibility's sake.

Let's talk about the specific Template:Weather box in Template talk:Weather box#Abbreviations.

--Nnemo (talk) 04:16, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It uses CSS, this snippet has to be put in the Common.css: abbr.abbr { border-bottom: 0; }

Od1n (talk) 05:53, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]