GuildWiki:Suggestions/In-line crafting material icons

Here on GuildWiki, whenever we list the crafting cost for weapons/armor, we've always used plain-text piped links to denote the crafting materials, like this:


 * 10 Iron, 5 Fangs

In contrast, Guild Wars Wiki uses in-line icons in place of the text links. They do this using templates that contain the image link with a hard-coded size parameter and alt text.


 * 10 [[Image:Iron Ingot.png|19px|Iron Ingot(s)]], 5 [[Image:Monstrous Fang.png|10px|Monstrous Fang(s)]]

I propose that we create similar templates for in-line crafting material icons and transition the crafting articles to use them instead.

See Arthur Ayala for a minimal example of what this might look like on a weaponsmith. Larger icons than 19px tall are an option, if they are not distinguishable at that size.

Pros

 * Would greatly increase the readability of the material cost column in crafting tables. Different pictures are always easier to distinguish than different words that are formatted identically.
 * Would also greatly reduce the space required for the material cells. While the difference in width between a text link and an icon would be small for a single material, nearly all crafting requires multiple materials, and the space savings would add up.
 * Would make it easier to edit crafting costs, as small templates  are easier to work with than piped links  . Of course, it shouldn't be necessary to edit crafting costs anymore, as they will probably never change.

Cons

 * Would require a lot of work to reformat all pages that contain armor or weapon crafting costs, including armor art pages, weaponsmith pages, perfect stat weapon pages, etc.
 * Of course, it wouldn't be necessary to reformat everything, and it wouldn't have to be completed immediately.
 * I am beginning a project to ensure consistent template usage on armor galleries, and will also be reformatting all weaponsmith tables in the near future, so I can take care of much of this at the same time.

Issues

 * The utility program that resizes images in our wiki (not sure if we're still using the default ImageMagick or not) has trouble with .png files - sometimes transparent backgrounds will come out as black when resized, like [[Image:Wood Plank.png|19px]]. This means that we couldn't rely on the wiki engine to resize the icons automatically.  Someone would have to resize the icons manually, then upload them with the height denoted in the name, like [[Image:Wood Plank 19px.png]].  These images would then have to redirect to the crafting material's article.
 * This is not as much of an issue for users who browse with IE, as they always see gray backgrounds on transparent .pngs anyway.