Talk:List of solar eclipses in the 20th century

Dates and Microformats
This article includes dates in the format:



Why is that? It might be better to use Start date, and to wrap each table row in an hCalendar microformat. This can best be one by making a template for each row; see, for example, Episode list, which does the same thing for television programmes. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I put in the display:none segments so that sortable worked properly (i.e. so that you could click on the date column to re-order the rows by that column, without e.g. 21 August 1914 coming before 21 January 1914). The nowrap was just to avoid the rows wrapping. It's probably not the optimal way, but it works, and does so without too much overhead. Mike Peel (talk) 14:02, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I can see the sense in that (don't dates sort correctly, otherwise?) and have suggested modifying Start date to the same end. Meanwhile, we could still proceed with the creation of and conversion to a template. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:32, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I've just found out that Sort exists, which might do the job here. Also see Sortname. Mike Peel (talk) 10:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * That's good - but I would still like to proceed with the row-template and microformat idea. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:19, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Why? What's the benefit? (I'm not against the idea; I just don't see the benefits.) Mike Peel (talk) 19:45, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * A reasonable question! It will make the data available as metadata, so that it can be re-used by software and web services. See for instance, the "Timeline" external link at the foot of List of crossings of the Willamette River. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:33, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Where are we with this? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:46, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Update Dec 2009
I replaced the "sortable" table. The original was unacceptably slow, taking many minutes for format in my IE8 browser.


 * Re-instated sort. Seems fine now, on a not especially fast machine.  Revert if it's not...--Gergyl (talk) 07:18, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

This replacement table lost some useful information on visibility, which I'll try to extract later from the history.

The OTHER centuries listed at List of solar eclipses are still using the old sortable list and slow!

Also I removed items from the "notable" list at the top. FALSE:
 * 10 May 1994: reached 99.9% totality momentarily over Atlanta, Georgia,

UNREFERENCED and uncleaar NOTABILITY
 * 20 July 1963: plays a role in the Stephen King novels Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne as well as a Season 3 episode of "Mad Men (S03E07)"
 * 10 July 1972: referred to in Carly Simon's #1 hit single "You're So Vain",
 * 26 February 1998: several Haitians were killed after trying to avoid the eclipse by taking overextensive measures
 * 11 July 1991: subject of an episode of the TV series Nova entitled "Eclipse of the Century." Passed over major observatories in Hawaii,

SockPuppetForTomruen (talk) 05:15, 14 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Hmmmm... Even my simple table was taking 30 seconds to build. I removed the Template:Coord and this seemed to speed things up. SockPuppetForTomruen (talk) 05:29, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Missing column: Location
All the other pages in this project previous to 20th have the 'Location' column with a lat/long. The template used here doesn't, is there a reason? C HAIRBOY (☎) 23:57, 4 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Lat/long was data ignored on the individual current eclipse event stat tables, not greatly valuable since the path can't be summarized by a single position. It is available at the source data . OH! And the GPS linking, I think that was slowing down page building at some point. Maybe its more efficient now? Tom Ruen (talk) 00:11, 5 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The single location seems to be for the point of Greatest Eclipse, which is still valuable data. Might be worth putting back in if that data's available. - C HAIRBOY  (☎) 19:00, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:List of solar eclipses in the 16th century which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 04:49, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Non-central
The non-central eclipses aren't labeled on the table. Aminabzz (talk) 15:03, 22 August 2023 (UTC)