Template talk:Saturn Footer

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Bryan: I went through and hacked out the "See also" sections on all articles that used this footer. *sigh*. I guess we have to put them back in. Would you like to help? -- hike395 00:35, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

I did the first articles in [1] down to Enceladus (moon). Gotta run. If someone else wants to keep going down the list, adding == See also==, please feel free. I'll come back in a few hours to finish up. -- hike395 00:43, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Oops, didn't see this talk: message until after you'd already started. I'll go through them and do everything else, sorry about the hassle. Bryan 02:31, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Wait, please! I decided that it was futile to go through and manually add ==See also== to all of the articles. I just put a non-header see also into the footer, now everything should be fine. - hike395 02:33, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't much care for this solution either. Not meaning to be picky, but attempting to seamlessly splice this footer into a see also section doesn't seem like the right approach. I'm going to try making a little table out of the links instead, like the other "category" footers have. Bryan 02:42, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Okay, here's my proposal, modelled closely on the Solar System footer:

Saturn
Tethys | Dione | Rhea | Titan | Iapetus
(For other moons, see: Saturn's natural satellites)

All the moons over 1000 kilometers in diameter are listed explicitly, and that seems like a reasonable cutoff between "major" and "minor" moons to me since the largest moon under that is only 498km in diameter. Bryan 02:51, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

I can go for this --- it is nice and compact. Remember that the footer has already been put into a See also section at Saturn's natural satellites, so it has to be hacked out.

My opinion: the msg mechanism is a generic macro. I think we could get more creative about the use of it, instead of making tons of little boxes everywhere. Your proposed box is just fine: I'm reacting to what I perceive to be excessive boxiness (check out the bottom of New Zealand, for example). I would suggest not putting this box at Saturn.

-- hike395 03:02, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Don't worry about the heavy lifting of formatting all the articles with this footer in them, I'm good at rapidly going through masses of articles to fix things like this. :) I agree that msg: should be for more than just boxes, but I dug up the style guide on the "see also" section and I think it supports my aversion to trying to splice a universal list of topics in: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#See_also_and_Related_topics_sections. I'll leave the footer off of Saturn itself, as you suggest. Bryan 03:06, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Just looked at New Zealand, BTW, and totally agree - oy. Fortunately, I doubt Saturn's moons are likely to become part of many international organizations or political groups that will bring additional footers along. :) Bryan 03:08, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Odd formatting problem: take a look at Helene (moon). Notice how the footer wants to lie underneath the infobox, and slides underneath it when you shrink the window? It's kind of strange. Is this fixable in some way? You know more about HTML than I do.

Not sure what the oddness is, it looks like it's behaving as intended to me (on Mozilla 1.7b). The br clear=all ensures that the footer stays below the floating table, and the left and right auto margins ensure that the footer stays centered. Since shrinking the window causes the infobox to move toward the centerline of the page, the "sliding underneath" effect is exactly what's supposed to happen. Bryan 04:53, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

I'm using IE6 on WinXP. I don't think it is browser dependent: I'm seeing the same thing. What I'm concerned about is, for the super-short articles, that the footer is shoved so far down and away from the real content that no one will notice or use it. So, for a test, I removed the br clear=all, and will introduce a little white space at the page itself (testing on Helene (moon). What do you think? -- hike395 11:03, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Looks okay to me. Hopefully with Cassini-Huygens about to arrive and conduct extensive exploration, these ultra-short articles will be expanded with new information soon. :) Bryan 19:31, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

By the way, I did the parallel footer at Template:Jupiter_Footer. I tried to tweak the style parameter to not use auto margins, which partially fixes the Helene-style problem, but looks ugly on normal pages like Io (moon). -- hike395 04:38, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

The attribute "align" is deprecated in the HTML specs for the table tag, so I prefer to avoid using it where possible [2]. That aside, I don't see what's ugly about the way it looks (again, under Mozilla 1.7b). What browser are you using, and how does it look to you? Bryan 04:53, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Got rid of the deprecated HTML. --- hike395 11:03, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Actually, since it's deprecated rather than obsolete, I don't have a huge problem with including it; I just think that the "style" method of centering the table should also be included as a hedge against future obsolescence. Bryan 19:31, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Too many moons

I think the list is getting a bit out of hand here. It used to be there was a small list of the major groups of moons, and the really big ones like Titan. But now everything's just lumped in. --Alexwcovington (talk) 21:04, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I agree, this is exactly the sort of excessive boxiness that the earlier discussion on this page was cautioning against. I'm going to be really bold and revert back to the 21 Jul 2004 version, which was the last one to have just a single row of moon names in it. Bryan 07:22, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

To each his own. I've split the full listing footer off into Template:Saturn Full Footer.

Urhixidur 13:19, 2005 May 6 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I was the one who reverted the template to the full list twice. I would like to point out that the moons in between Saturn and Janus and also the moon Epimetheus are missing so I would appreciate it if someone would add in the missing moons.

I had another look and discovered that more moons were also missing from the template. I also have a suggestion: why don't we use the full list on the Saturn page and also the page on Saturn's natural satellites.

I'm just doing a quick drive-by watchlist check at the moment so I won't have time to add those moons until later tonight, but I'll definitely have a look at it then if nobody beats me to it. As for using the full list on those two pages, that sounds perfectly fine to me - those two pages are exactly where one would expect a "master summary" to be. Bryan 23:27, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Did you add those moons yet?

Nope, Epimethus is covered by "Janus' group" and the remaining missing moons all seemed pretty tiny and insignificant so I decided it wasn't worth the extra space. I'm reverting yet again to the smaller version, could you perhaps explain why you keep on reverting to the too-long version instead of just using the "full" footer template? Bryan 29 June 2005 23:22 (UTC)

It takes too long and I can't be bothered. You can imagine how long it takes to change the Saturn Footer template into Saturn Full Footer. But, since you insist, I will change the Saturn Footer into the Saturn Full Footer.

You can't be bothered to explain, but you can be bothered to spend two months reverting and then going around and changing lots of articles over to a different template? I'm going to be reverting some of those too, BTW; the whole point of trimming down this template was that it's too cluttered having a list of every single moon of Saturn at the bottom of every single moon of Saturn article. In some of those articles the template is larger than the article itself is. Bryan 1 July 2005 00:38 (UTC)

What's your point? What do you mean by you're reverting some of those?

I mean that I don't think it's appropriate to have a full list of all of Saturn's moons at the bottom of each and every article on one of Saturn's moons. It's not the name of the template that I have a problem with, it's whether the template itself is big. It doesn't matter if the template is called "Saturn Footer" or "Saturn Full Footer", I don't think the full list should be on every Saturn-moon-related page. So as far as I'm concnerned, reverting this template to include a full list of moons is exactly the same as changing all the articles to use "Saturn Full Footer" - if I revert one, I'll revert the other too.

As for my request for an explanation, I'm asking you to put some sort of description here of why you think the full listing is better rather than just trying to push the issue through with uncommented reverts. Saying you "can't be bothered" to do so completely fails to convince me of anything, and doesn't even give me a basis for discussion or compromise of my own. What else do you expect me to do? Bryan 1 July 2005 05:10 (UTC)

I've asked at the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Dynamic_templates? if the wiki wizards can't come up with a dynamic toggle, something like a Tree View control, for templates. Because otherwise I can't see any way to reconcile those who want the Full footer from those who'd rather have the compact one... Urhixidur 2005 July 1 03:38 (UTC)

Something like this would have all sorts of other similar applications; the debate over whether infobox and navbox templates are too big crops up all over the place from time to time. Bryan 1 July 2005 05:10 (UTC)

[edit] Back again

It makes no sense to list everything with an observed orbit all at once with no differentiation. Saturn's truly major satellites, along with the main groupings of the minor satellites, should be the main footer.

I would suggest that each article in the minor groups then also include a template based on that minor group, organized by orbital radius or size. This would be a much more elegant solution than simply throwing all the names out there, at once, everywhere. -Alexwcovington (talk) 1 July 2005 07:50 (UTC)

It is interesting. I was just browsing through the moons that sounded interesting, using the full list (on the articles that have it). I ended up linking to an entry that uses the condensed list, and I found it much less useful. I wanted to be able to skip between any moon I wanted, which takes one click rather than two... Maybe you could have subsections in the footer? Have a heading for each group and links to the moons in that group underneath? The suggestion above sounds OK too. --Baryonic Being 11:37, 28 July 2005 (UTC)