This is a documentation subpage for Template:Key Start (see that page for the template itself).
It contains usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.
Highlights
- Users can duplicate any existing key and modify, translate, or shorten it, with requiring an expert or administrator to allow it to them.
- It is possible to rearrange the key or add new couplets or leads with new taxa.
- In both cases, renumbering the leads is a problem, but while building a key up, non-consecutive lead numbers can be an interim solution.
- Both lead statements and taxon links can contain links to internal wiki pages or external web pages, defining or explaining characters, states, or taxa.
- Taxon or character images with captions and automatic resizing may be added to any lead (whether a taxon lead or not).
Usage
The templates Template:SingleAccessKey and Template:Lead are to be used in combination. Please switch into edit or view mode using the tab on top of the screen to see the "code" calling the templates.
| Start of an English Key with backlinks, links to English Wikipedia, and a footnote |
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Single access keys created with these templates may be strictly dichotomous (two alternatives, as above) or they may be polytomous (some couplets having more than 2 alternatives, not shown). Furthermore, it is possible to design keys in statement-style (as above) or in question-answer-style as follows:
| Example of the start of a key in question-answer-style |
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For testing, also a technical sample of a reticulated key, resulting in a Directed Acyclical Graph (this key is complete, i.e. unlike the other examples it has no dangling leads):
| Techical example of reticulated key (lead 4 has two parents: 3 and 6) |
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</small>
| This is just a test of complicate data structures for Javier test) |
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Introduction for developers
The key is a table with a dummy column to enable partial overlap between left and right text in different rows. Overlap is possible only between a long lead statement with a short number pointer, long lead statements with a long taxon name can not overlap. Each lead is a separate row, if images are present they are added in an additional row where required.
Javascript programmability: Each row contains an id attribute with "L" + lead number + "row", the lead cell itself an id attribute with "L" + lead number. The table is styled mostly using css classes, with the text span background an exception (to allow parameterization of the background).
TODO
- Add the key id to each lead id, to support multiple keys on a wikipage. Work on this was started, but not finished!
- Improvements: The key title could be displayed better than as caption, a description parameter could be added.
- A FRIDA html key for comparison. One major difference is that FRIDA always places the taxon in a row of its own.
Known problems
- A plain three column layout is less than satisfactory; the occasional wide taxon names force the whole last column to be very wide.
- To some extent, this is already worked around by providing a four-column layout with alternating colspan (33% of table width is assigned to statement, if no taxon is present, or to taxon, if that is present. However, this still means that the statement may be presented shorter than necessary.
- Clicking on the hyperlinks usually has no effect if the screen already contains the target lead.
- Proposed solution: some javascript additions. Note: JS can not be called directly from within the wiki text for security reasons, or any user could reprogram the wiki into a dangerous tool.
- Leads do not automatically renumber.
- There is an obvious service solutions for this: The project would have to program a "bot" program, the works through all keys that have a category like "Please renumber" set, renumbering the key in an optimal way, and then deleting (or commenting out) the category.
- There are no lead dots running from the statement to the number.
- Attempting to fix this with <span style="float:right"> . . . .</span> did not work well!
- Can this be fixed with a repeated background image and non-transparent text? Could be worth testing!
Dependencies
Currently this depends on some styles in MediaWiki:Common.css, one of which refers to a background image which must be available, and it needs the StringFunctions extension installed.
It requires several templates to be installed. The central template being Template:Lead, other templates: Template:Trim, Template:SingleAccessKey/doc, Template:Lead/doc, Template:Documentation, Template:Documentation/subpage, Template:Documentation/docname, Template:Documentation/preload.
