Wikipedia:Template standardisation/demometa

Features
Templates: master • seriousissue • contentissue • styleissue • articlenotice

The general idea is that being able to type in   is better than putting a bunch of wiki or HTML syntax in every template that follows the same form. We can and should still use CSS in the master template (because CSS reduces parsing on server and client and conserves bandwidth and can be cached and all that good stuff). Some examples of features of the proposed implementation:

Following are some comparisons of syntax with the meta template proposal and without it. Click the "Edit" link for the H2 (headers with lines under them) to compare the wiki syntax easily. In most cases, the "with meta" syntax is significantly clearer to read and edit.

Note that all of these examples take the form of   because this is just a proposal at this point. If implemented, the "production" names would be things like   or whatever. So the actual benefit would be even clearer than the following would suggest.

Use meta
Can't put equals signs or pipes in actual parameters to templates, because parser thinks it's trying to be another template parameter. Can be worked around using ! and &amp;#61; and explicit template parameter names but I'm not sure that's worth the trouble.