Talk:Theoretical biology

Article start
Starting independent article on 'theoretical biology'. Original page had no content, only a redirect to Mathematical biology. Methinks Theoretical biology encompasses more than Mathematical biology and warrants an independent article. --Anthony.Sebastian 23:15, 1 October 2008 (CDT)

Formatting
Please remove the spaces that precede footnotes. In proper style, there should be no such spaces. --Larry Sanger 14:46, 12 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I removed all the spaces preceding footnotes. --Anthony.Sebastian 22:00, 12 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Larry, regarding your remark that the inventor of "" needs to brush up re whether to italicize indented blockquotes: In the Intro, I show an alternate form of blockquote, sans italics, font-size slightly larger than the miniscule one used by standard blockquote, and bolded. Any objections using that format throughout? --Anthony.Sebastian 22:00, 12 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Tom Morris might object. --Anthony.Sebastian 22:00, 12 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I most certainly will, and in the strongest possible terms. I removed all that formatting crapola from the article - it looks silly. If the Citizendium doesn't look right, it shouldn't be fixed by adding custom HTML to specific articles, but by getting the tech people to change the stylesheet globally. On the Web, it is good practice to follow the separation of presentation and content. This applies here. Blockquotes (marked with a blockquote element or not) should look consistent across the whole article. We just write the material for the pages - the style is site-wide. There's aboslutely no reason why the block quotes should be dark blue and larger on Theoretical biology and nowhere else. Consistency and content/style separation are important. --Tom Morris 22:33, 12 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Tom, I respect you for your interest, and for your strong feelings about consistency. I regret our disagreement on this 'blockquote' issue. I, too, have a great interest in the quality of CZ, in respect of both content and presentation. I support the idea of consistency of presentation within articles and certainly a foundation of consistency among articles. In the case of Theoretical biology, Larry has already asked for consistency in eliminating spaces preceding footnote designators, and clearly he intends that to apply 'among articles'.  In addition, he has commented to the effect that the "" function lacks quality, specifically that it italicizes an indented blockquote whereas it should not. I agree.  But I submit that the "" function also lacks quality in virtue of its reduced font-size, which deemphasizes the quote when we put it in to emphasize a point.  I agree the font-size of the blockquote needn't equal that of the font-size of the main text, and think a 10-15% reduction sufficient to help set it off from the main text, which the right-and-left indentations also help do.  Bolding seems appropriate, and a little color can only help the emphasis.  For long blockquotes, I like Gareth Leng's idea of putting them in text boxes.


 * I do not advocate that every CZ article utilize my attempt in Theoretical biology at improving the presentation of blockquotes, though I do advocate consistency within the article. CZ still calls itself 'beta', so honest attempts to make changes do not seem inappropriate.


 * Thank you again for your earnest thoughts. I hope others will weigh in.

Regarding blockquotes
All: Please review the format of the blockquote in the Introduction. I propose to render all the blockquotes in this article with the same format. Please weigh in, and offer any suggestions you might have. I outlined my thoughts on this in the Talk item preceding this. --Anthony.Sebastian 01:04, 13 October 2008 (UTC)