Category talk:United Kingdom by-election navigational boxes

By-elections to the 37th UK Parliament

Discussion moved from User_talk:BrownHairedGirl#By-elections_to_the_37th_UK_Parliament

I created {{By-elections to the 37th UK Parliament}} a few days ago, but I held off adding it to articles, as it looks very long. I've been considering splitting it in two (36-39; 40-45) or even three (36-38; 39-41; 42-45) - purely to reduce its length. As you created many of the other templates in the series, I'd be interested to hear whether you think this is a good idea. Warofdreams talk 03:15, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Good point! It is pretty huge :(

When I first looked at it, I thought that splitting it was appropriate, but then when I thought about how to split it, I reckoned that the navigation between the fragments would end up producing rather clumsy headers. So I wondered about making the box collapsible.

That turned out to be a rather complicated exercise, but after playing with several of the templates listed at Template:Navigation/doc, I found a way of using Template:Navbox generic to create a template which is collapsed when loaded.

I have created a test version at Template:By-elections to the 37th UK Parliament/sandbox, and for demonstration purposes, I have applied it to the Maldon by-election, 1942.

That reduces the visual bulk of template, because it occupies only one line when loaded. It does have a much heavier impact on the download weight of the page: up from 30KB without the template to 80KB with it. I'm not sure how much attention to pay to that: I the 1990s, I used to work hard to keep webpages as lightweight as possible, but bandwidth is much less of an issue these days, and an extra 50KB doesn't seem to me to be too heavy a payload (it's the equivalent of having a few images attached).

What do you think? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:55, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I like that. I'd be happy to move the sandbox version here, and then implement the same style for the other templates in the series. Warofdreams talk 12:32, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Great! I'll do that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:19, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Now done. All existing templates converted to the pre-collapsed format using Template:Navbox generic, and new templates created for 1918-1935. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:49, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

That looks great. Good work! Warofdreams talk 14:59, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks :) --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:55, 31 July 2007 (UTC)