User talk:Webmaster

The wiki is a good resource, and I'm always interested in improving it. However, I have some feature requests that are important for making the Wiki a better place.

MediaWiki Version

The first is to update to MediaWiki version 1.18. It's a rather recent version, and I'm confident that a certain bug will be fixed in it. That bug governs categories with lots of elements in them.

I'm attempting to put the entire OpenGL API in the wiki (so that errors can be corrected much more quickly than with Bugzilla reports). I started from the DocBook man pages, using a specialized XSLT to convert them to MediaWiki format. That worked great... except for one problem. The category page for GL 4.x's API has an issue. If you press the "next 200" link, nothing changes.

This was a known bug in MediaWiki, which I believe they corrected in version 1.18. Since the current GL Wiki is still on 1.17, there's a problem.

Thanks for the Math fix, and I noticed you updated to 1.18. When that didn't seem to fix the issue on that category page, I filed a bug report on it. According to the response to the bug, the problem comes from the CategoryTree extension. If we're still using an older version of that, could you upgrade it to the latest version? If it still doesn't work after the upgrade, let me know so I can re-open the bug.

Thanks for the help. Alfonse 05:38, 27 January 2012 (PST)

We are on the latest version of CategoryTree, but turns out on the wrong branch. I've updated to the latest branch and latest revision. Let me know if this works out for you. I'll go through and verify the other extensions to be sure we are on the latest branch for everything.

Webmaster 06:32, 27 January 2012 (PST)

Math support

The next thing that would be great would be proper support for the <math> tag. The parser can process it, but that alone is insufficient. The <math> tag is intrinsically bound to the MediaWiki Math Extension. Without that extension, you just get an error when you try to use the <math> tag.

In order to fully bring the man pages into the Wiki, we need the ability to create math equations. They'd also be great for several other pages. Wouldn't this page on depth buffer precision work much better if it used real equations rather than unformatted inline text?

Updated the Math extension. Sample:

$\operatorname {erfc} (x)={\frac {2}{\sqrt {\pi }}}\int _{x}^{\infty }e^{-t^{2}}\,dt={\frac {e^{-x^{2}}}{x{\sqrt {\pi }}}}\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }(-1)^{n}{\frac {(2n)!}{n!(2x)^{2n}}}$

Webmaster 13:20, 23 January 2012 (PST)

Presentation

There are certain elements of presentation that could be better in the Wiki. Without access to the CSS's that the Wiki uses, these cannot be altered.

For example, take the <source> tag. This tag includes syntax highlighting, which is excellent (though the GLSL syntax highlighter could use some updating for GLSL 4.20 and all). But the size of the source box is just too big and noticeable.

Contrast the difference between this:

void glMultiDrawArrays( GLenum mode, GLint * first, GLsizei * count, GLsizei primcount );

and this:

void glMultiDrawArrays( GLenum mode, GLint * first, GLsizei * count, GLsizei primcount );

The large bars at the top and bottom take up too much space. The font is also needlessly bigger and bulkier.

It would also be good if the CSS had some constraints on it for exceptionally wide source for <pre> and <source> tags. That way, wide text would just create a scrollbar rather than breaking the page layout.

This can be done by setting the overflow CSS property for these elements to "auto". You could also use the max-height property on <source> elements to constrain the height of these elements. Those elements that exceed the height would get their own vertical scroll bars.

Alfonse 11:23, 23 January 2012 (PST)

Would this page help? http://www.opengl.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Geshi.css

Webmaster 13:20, 23 January 2012 (PST)