Guild Wars 2 Wiki talk:Semantic Forms

Commentary

→ moved from Form talk:Skill infobox

• judging by the "show changes" preview, it cuts all the whitespace out from between the equals sign, the content and the pipe. thats really ugly wikicode to my mind.
• also I just noticed that the usage of dropdowns with a different case to the existing content (e.g. form says "Elementalist", page says "elementalist") the form deletes the existing bit.
• can we limit values to only be numbers? type=number didn't seem to work in the preview. -Chieftain Alex 20:35, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

values from property isn't working, I figure it would be the same as input type for properties we have.--Relyk ~ talk < 20:41, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

property parameter works fine! I think it was input type instead of type like you did with the others alex.--Relyk ~ talk < 20:45, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

• when creating the form, it tried to generate param names automatically, but it got quite a few of them wrong - I manually corrected "chain1", "kit/race" + "icon".
• additionally, the parameter sequence that it generates seems pretty random.
• autocomplete text yields some very odd search results. -Chieftain Alex 20:47, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Nice. limiting to property makes it display must be a valid number on preview after entering a rubbish value. -Chieftain Alex 20:50, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

it generates the allowed values automatically depending on the property, so it'll do much of the work for us. Generating the radio buttons for Is historical is nice too! I'm not sure how values from category works, it because up Category:Activity NPCs. I assume it picks up any subcategories so I don't think we can use that in most cases with our category hierarchy.--Relyk ~ talk < 21:01, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think we can use Has attunement, since atm our input for the infobox is "air/earth/water/fire" whereas the property name is "air attunement/earth attunement..." etc. -Chieftain Alex 21:03, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, the skill infobox kind of does it backwards with concatenating "Attunement" instead of a switch statement. Edit: Fixed!--Relyk ~ talk < 21:08, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

thought you might do that ;D (obviously it still ditches parameters that aren't on the dropdown list :( )

that it doesn't show a preview of the infobox appearance when you press "show preview" is pretty lame, and also it doesn't list used templates at the bottom so you can go look up what the format for {{skill data}} - it effectively destroys the point of having the show preview button - I might remove it. Show changes is good, but I bet not many people check that when given the choice between preview+changes. -Chieftain Alex 01:15, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

No show preview is zzz. The show changes button seemed useful to me as far as changing existing infoboxes.--Relyk ~ talk < 03:09, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

I was going to stick [[Page has default form::Skill infobox| ]] into the bottom of the skill infobox template - allowing users to edit using a form via the tabs + see if it encourages users to edit after skill updates, but its pretty bad that it deletes stuff + doesn't show a preview... it might do more damage than good.

Alternatively, we could remove profession, since thats not really going to change, and all of the other parameters that we don't expect to change, leaving a shorter template (form could be renamed "Skill infobox update" or something). This might be useful after updates. (remaining parameters would be "variables", "description", "recharge/activation/intiative" + possibly "historical") -Chieftain Alex 10:09, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

If you really want to start pushing the use of forms, I would recommend a different infobox to start with. The skill infobox is horribad to begin with - I've been meaning to rewrite it since I joined the wiki, but at first I didn't want to cause any more disruption than I already had (by pushing for the installation of SMW), and now I don't have the time/motivation. —Dr Ishmael 17:18, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

effectively, I've already seen that forms:

a) screw up the raw wikicode formatting, removing space between = signs and pipes (and generally making it unreadable to me)

b) like to delete values it doesn't recognise (e.g. lowercase + uppercase inputs are all lowercase'd in many of our templates, but if the input case doesn't match the expected its ditched)

c) can't be previewed before saving - personally I spam the preview button before saving because I know I'll be putting typos everywhere. (it won't be obvious when the form has deleted values)

d) don't display used subtemplates in a list below the save area - poor for going to documentation for subtemplates.

I can't think of any templates where I wouldn't care about the raw wikicode. plus forms seem to be for editing existing pages, which won't help users setup new pages (i.e. pages which won't have links to form creation options). forms possibly aren't useful in the majority of cases...

perhaps I have the target audience confused though + I need to think about how scary is wikicode for normal viewers. if they see that the recharge is wrong on a skill, would they be any more likely to use a form than editing raw wikicode to fix it? in which case perhaps forms only need to edit changeable values. -Chieftain Alex 17:35, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Forms are more useful for creating new articles compared to changing as it's an easy way to see what parameters are available and they can't get the values wrong. It's easy enough for someone to add spacing afterwards because at least a new user can create the page with the infobox. Skill infobox is kind of bad to start with as ishmael explained and we don't have many new skills to create apart from bundles and costumes. We can use another infobox for the test bed.--Relyk ~ talk < 20:00, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Except how are new users going to get to a creation form for anything? (they sure as heck aren't going to go via Special:SpecialPages -> Special:FormStart ...). I'm not expecting a GW2W:HELP page with rows of links to forms >.> -Chieftain Alex 20:18, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

mw:Extension:Semantic Forms/Linking to forms —Dr Ishmael 20:29, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't see how that helps for new un-smw-linked and un-wikilinked pages, previously with titles unknown, which don't have a separate namespace (unless we link every page to "create with form"? in which case if we use more than one users will be confronted with a wall of forms) -Chieftain Alex 20:53, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Game updates seem like a good place to use #formlink.--Relyk ~ talk < 21:06, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

amusingly it exposes a major failure in our vector css, and probably MW's, in that it inserts the sitenotice, puts a tab link to "special page" floating in the middle of nowhere.. -Chieftain Alex 21:20, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Fireball and Fireball, it doesn't work without specifying the target parameter :o--Relyk ~ talk < 21:39, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

[[Form:Recipe]]

I don't know how to correct it such that on save it doesn't move the form corrected template to the top of the page - I want it to stay in position. -Chieftain Alex 18:16, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

That's how SF works. A page can only be associated with a single form that is tied to the primary template on the page, i.e. the infobox. You can't use forms for two different templates on a page. —Dr Ishmael 18:28, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

ah nuts. so it can't be used in a straightforward fashion for vendor table row either. that would have been good. (could have a semantic form sandbox, create sections in it, and then cut paste into the right article though) -Chieftain Alex 18:30, 17 November 2013 (UTC)