Template talk:Geological history of Earth

Link to deleted portal removed
The Geological history of Earth portal was recently deleted. I've removed the red link from the template. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 12:47, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Distingish periods from era via box width?
edited the template to have the second column have different width for periods (from Cambrian onwards) than for the eras (in the pre-Cambrian). I thought this looked strange, so I reverted back to having the second column have equal widths. What do other editors think? —hike395 (talk) 13:26, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I underestimated the necessary width - now fixed. Colonies Chris (talk) 13:37, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what got fixed by reverting my edit. The second column is now uneven: the eras of the Proterozoic are much wider than the periods of the Phanerozoic. I think the present layout looks bad: I believe that the first two columns should have the same width over all rows.
 * Let's see if we can get more editors viewpoints over at WT:GEOLOGY —hike395 (talk) 22:10, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Later --- maybe you're not seeing the same layout that I am? I removed the "era" to make the columns (almost) line up. —hike395 (talk) 03:26, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
 * In my revised version, the period boxes all line up on the right and they are only the width necessary to contain the text (18.5em). The current version wastes space on the left as the period boxes are unnecessarily wide. The removal of 'era' (which makes sense to me) further reduces the necessary width for those boxes to 16.5em. Colonies Chris (talk) 13:37, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I think it looks very different on different platforms and browsers. On my iPad in Safari, there is large amounts of white space. On Firefox under Ubuntu, 19em leaves no room, and 16.5 makes the second column ragged. I think we need to be conservative to avoid ragged columns. —hike395 (talk) 07:01, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Changed kya, Mya, Gya and realigned Archean eras
I've changed the use of kya, Mya, Gya suffixes to the ISO and geological standards (|Aubry et al. 2009) of ka, Ma, Ga and redirected the links to the Year page. Additionally I realigned the Archean eras and removed the word era from where it placed for clarity and consistency. Jarred C Lloyd (talk) 15:04, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Width of second column
I think I've solved the mystery of the width of the second column looking different on different browsers. Previously, we were using 'em' as the unit of width, which is the height of the M in the user's font. But different browsers are using different fonts, with slightly different aspect ratios. So using 'em' leaves big white space in some browsers, and uneven boxes in others.

What I've done is use the less-well-known 'ch' unit, which is the width of the 0. I've set the width of the second column to 26ch, which seems to make a nice width with little padding across all the browsers I checked: Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and Edge.

In a previous edit, I reduced the number of significant digits in the time spans for each entry. I'd still like to keep those to three significant digits, because more would appear to be visual clutter. — hike395 (talk) 17:16, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Order of stages/ages?
When viewing the template in a narrow browser window it causes the stages/ages to be displayed as a single column with each section ordered from the oldest to the most recent for example the Jurassic and Triassic sections read as: Early (201–174 Ma)

Middle (174–164 Ma)

Late (164–145 Ma)

Early (252–247 Ma)

Middle (247–237 Ma)

Late (237–201 Ma) Rather than: Late (164–145 Ma)

Middle (174–164 Ma)

Early (201–174 Ma)

Late (237–201 Ma)

Middle (247–237 Ma)

Early (252–247 Ma) To me the second version seems easier to follow. Is their a particular reason why they are arranged as they are or would it be possible to change the layout. EdwardUK (talk) 11:15, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
 * When I rescued the template from deletion in 2015, I put the periods into that order, but asked other editors what the right order is. No one responded. I'm happy to change it to be the other order. — hike395 (talk) 08:57, 22 June 2023 (UTC)