Template talk:Markups

Eagle House = 408/449-9039

Contents 1 Purpose 2 Usage 3 Examples 3.1 Examples of use 4 History

Purpose

PLEASE NOTE: This template may look like a lot of things that it is not. Kindly take the time to understand its purpose before editing it.

{{markups}} inserts a table of Unicode character entities in such a way that one can copy the codes without having to open the page for editing. There are thousands of Unicode entities; this particular small subset is geared to avoiding MediaWiki markup. This is useful when building technical templates, documenting templates and markup, or producing sample markup. In many cases, <nowiki> tags can be used to suspend wiki rendering; but using the entities gives more flexibility and avoids known bugs.

Please do not add random entities to this template. Many common special characters may be typed into the edit box and will be resolved to entities if necessary. A JavaScript edit toolbar is available, though buggy. This template is already a little big and if much more goes in, something will have to come out.

Usage

{{markups|floatkey}}

Insert this template on your user page or a convenient subpage. Transclude or substitute as you please; substitution would normally be suggested for something of this kind, but it contains quite a lot of messy markup. Choose floatkey as either left or right; if no parameter is given, the table will float right anyway.

The next step is to copy entities into your markup, creating metamarkup. These will render as the markup characters themselves, rather than provoke actions. If the text of the rendered page is again copied and pasted into an edit window, then the markup will take effect.

If, on the other hand, you want to step backwards, creating metametamarkup, escape every & with & or & -- thus constructs of the form &#nnnn; will render as &#nnnn;

Note that these characters all have ISO-8859-1 named entities, such as → (which renders as →); however, MediaWiki asserts Unicode encoding and it is safest to use Unicode entities here.

Note that it is highly unlikely that any of this material should appear in article mainspace. It is most useful when building technical templates or explaining some feature of markup to other editors.

Finally, if you don't understand this explanation, suggest you try this all out in the Sandbox or create one or more private sandboxes at [[User:Yourname/Sandbox1]], etc. You'll be glad you did.

Examples

Examples of use

<div> 
  → <div>

[[Billion]] 
  → [[Billion]]

{{[[:Billion]]}}
  → {{[[:Billion]]}}
     → {{Billion}}

History

This file is taken from a Wikipedia-related project and is licensed under GFDL. →Bear 06:29, 28 July 2007 (EDT)