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Showing posts from October, 2012

5 years of Article message boxes

Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for " Article message boxes ". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles. Today I noticed that these boxes are now just over 5 years (and a month) old. They were first introduced to the general public starting from September 2007 . Their features are in short; a single consistent design, color coded for severity and purpose, dynamic but consistent in width (stackable), IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 compatible and a consistent parameter setup for its content. And that is a big deal, because I still remember what it looked like before when it had none of that. There were dozens of templates with different widths, different colors, different spacing and they all had different parameters. [I've been trying to find an image from back then, but I haven't been able to find one.