Manual talk:$wgTranslateNumerals

Linebreak for better readability

I added a linebreak in the description to force it to second line because in large screens (Vector legacy) it's stretching too far and not easy to read. @Shirayuki, you reverted, and actually even used 'rollback' which has no reason field and meant for fighting vandalism. You now claimed it would 'wastes translators' time'. So please explain how a linebreak 'wastes' translators time, who are by the way not forced do any or all translation. – Ammarpad (talk) 12:27, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ammarpad. I might be able to help clarify!

• I agree the lack of linebreaks in Vector-legacy, when used in large windows on large screens, can make text harder to read. That's why a fixed-width is the default (but toggle-able) setting in Vector-2022, which is now the default on this wiki.
• The first edit did use technically incorrect markup ("</br>") -- The slash goes after the tag name, when writing in XHTML. (However, that's not important here, as the parser cleans it up (IIUC).)
• Adding <br />s in the middle of a sentence is not good, because:
  • It forces linebreaks in all skins, even those which didn't need one.
  • It forces linebreaks in all languages, even those which might not need it, or not at that exact position. (unless each translator assumes/understands that they can ignore it or move it)
  • It mixes 'content' with 'presentation', which we try to avoid.
• It's a burden to translators, because:
  • For existing translations, they would see the "invalidated" pink background for the string, and thus feel like they need to update it
  • For new translations, they would need to write the HTML code (which is non-standard elsewhere in translations) and might get sidetracked into having to learn what it does.
• And perhaps most importantly, it doesn't scale well - because we can't manually add linebreaks everywhere that anyone with a large screen might want them to be, for all the reasons above.

I hope that helps to explain some of the complexities involved! Best wishes, –Quiddity (talk) 21:04, 24 September 2024 (UTC)