Template talk:Generic-table-end

I would argue against the use of this as a template. There are 2 reason that the Skills templates are split into parts.


 * 1) It's to make it more easy to add familiar looking content to pages, and allow for optional entries (hence Skill_attribute_entry, Skill_energy_entry etc.).
 * 2) It is in case, in the future, someone decides to change the format of all skill boxes.

In doing so they may decide that a table is no longer the best way of displaying the skill or that the Template:Skill_end should contain some additional information such as a link. If a "generic table end" then while the first reson may be satisfied the second reason is not. The generic table end template might also be included in other articles besides skills, in which case someone could not alter generic table end since it might affect pages that aren't skills. Basically someone would have to go through every skill and modify them all to look at "skill end". - LordBiro.

The way I look at it is this: if you're going to have a template that is primarily a table, and has a modular body, you're going to need to end the template with |}. Rather than having skill-end, collector-armor-end, xyz-end all having the exact same content (|}), I figured we could use generic table end. This allows us to show that this is part of the ending of the template, rather than just |} (which I considered using as well, but it didn't flow as well as this.) Your concern is legitimate, however. Just trying to balance clutter vs actual needs. Adam

Well, I do see your point, I just don't want to be in a situation where more than 1 section, lets say items and loactions, use generic-table-end, and then someone decides that really items should use a div instead of a table. If you used Item_end you just change the content of Item_end to, but if you are using Generic-table-end then you have to change every item page to use Generic-div-end. I think I'm labouring the point now, and I seen you've changed the armor collector page to use a totally different template, so I'll shut up ;) - LordBiro

I see your point as well. And I agree with it, after playing around with templates more. Templates allow you to be malleable, and the introduction of generic components reduces the autonomy of the template and creates a dependancy, since the generic linked item cannot be changed without altering other things that touch it. Maybe we should just delete the generic template end =) Adam