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I created {{By-elections to the 37th UK Parliament}} a few days ago, but I held off adding it to articles, as it looks very long. I've been considering splitting it in two (36-39; 40-45) or even three (36-38; 39-41; 42-45) - purely to reduce its length. As you created many of the other templates in the series, I'd be interested to hear whether you think this is a good idea. Warofdreamstalk03:15, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Good point! It is pretty huge :(
When I first looked at it, I thought that splitting it was appropriate, but then when I thought about how to split it, I reckoned that the navigation between the fragments would end up producing rather clumsy headers. So I wondered about making the box collapsible.
That turned out to be a rather complicated exercise, but after playing with several of the templates listed at Template:Navigation/doc, I found a way of using Template:Navbox generic to create a template which is collapsed when loaded.
That reduces the visual bulk of template, because it occupies only one line when loaded. It does have a much heavier impact on the download weight of the page: up from 30KB without the template to 80KB with it. I'm not sure how much attention to pay to that: I the 1990s, I used to work hard to keep webpages as lightweight as possible, but bandwidth is much less of an issue these days, and an extra 50KB doesn't seem to me to be too heavy a payload (it's the equivalent of having a few images attached).
Yes, I like that. I'd be happy to move the sandbox version here, and then implement the same style for the other templates in the series. Warofdreamstalk12:32, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]