- First conversation copied from Talk:Catherine Stuart (Abt 1851-?).
As mentioned on the Yewenyi upgrade forum a week ago, the infobox and offspring box overlap. Who can fix? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:52, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
- Not on my screen, the offspring box is nicely below the info box. It must depend on which browser you are using, what your screen resolution is, and perhaps whether there is an "r" in the month. Thurstan 04:05, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
- The above was written on my XP notebook using IE (version 8). I fired up a Linux box, and with Firefox (version 2.0.0.6) the boxes overlap if the window is too narrow. My standard is to code {{Clear}} before the offspring box (which is actually to stop that box being stupidly narrow when the general infobox is too wide). Thurstan 04:58, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
We are discussing Template:Showinfo children and/or its eventual replacement Template:Showfacts children. Appearance seems to depend on browser, with IE8 OK and Firefox 2 (which I always use at present) not OK. See above. I use the custom skin for Familypedia. Offspring boxes seem unnecessarily wide in several cases; Catherine Stuart's has less space available in its header row than in the lower rows but has a space amounting to about 12% of the page width before the word "Offspring" (and presumably the same at the end), giving the impression that it may be trying to occupy the full page width, while the infobox is a modest 36% of the page width. The right-hand end of the offspring box is invisible, though some of its contents are mixed up in the infobox.
I've seen it elsewhere recently, e.g. on an otherwise exemplary page Henry I, King of England (1068-1135). His offspring boxes overlap in the same way, extending uniformly to about 78% of the page/pane width, so that the overlap is about 16%.
Thurstan's solution of inserting {{clr}} overcomes the problem but leaves an awful lot of white space in the text area if the person (e.g. Henry I) has a long list of spouses and not much biography on the page.
Please can we restrict it to, say 60%? (As I did not design the offspring boxes, I'm not qualified to "be bold" and fiddle with their size myself.) There seems to be no restriction at present. There may be value in also putting a restriction on the infobox, to, say, the 36% that seems to fit nicely and cater for nearly everything it could want.
— Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:07, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
- Because folks seem to be insistent on including superfluous information like middle name and death dates in article titles, it doesn't really matter what percentage you set the tables at. Eg: The screen real estate needed to display "Charles Fredrick Freudenberg (1887-1942)" (see Arthur Oscar Freudenberg I (1891-1968)) requires a person infobox at least 344 pixels wide. This means that on a 1024 wide laptop screen you have already blown away over a third of your pixels. 240 pixels goes to the wikia sidebar, so this means that the child infobox won't fit if it is anything more than 440 pixels wide. If the box has just one child with such a similar name, then you blow another 238 pixels, leaving you with just 220 pixels to cram in the birth and death dates and locations.
- If we really want to ship such watermelons in boxes, sure, it is technically possible to cram them into teensy boxes. The tables can be made to dynamically rescale themselves, but the resultant mess will not be due to poor box design but the size of the objects you are trying to cram into this narrow space. If you don't believe me, mock up a table with these constraints. Whatever you do, they will look jumbled, so illegible that I doubt folks would want to look at them. And this is all because we want to ape paper genealogy tables by including middle names and death dates, with the side benefit that we also entirely defeat autocompletion ("word wheel" suggested names).
- Thank you for the technical details. OK, the Freudenberg infobox is a little wider than standard (about 10%?) because of Charles; however, if the offspring box for an extreme case of that width could be restricted as I requested, I would still be able to see nearly everything in it instead of one-and-a-bit cells out of three. Length of names is a separate off-topic issue, which I'm quite willing to see reopened. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:06, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
- On the contrary, I pointed out why length of names is central to this topic. I am going to shrink the text, not the boxes as you proposed. The net effect is the same. 66.133.248.61 07:13, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
- Thank you for the technical details. OK, the Freudenberg infobox is a little wider than standard (about 10%?) because of Charles; however, if the offspring box for an extreme case of that width could be restricted as I requested, I would still be able to see nearly everything in it instead of one-and-a-bit cells out of three. Length of names is a separate off-topic issue, which I'm quite willing to see reopened. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:06, 25 July 2009 (UTC)