Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26692787-20151030123440/@comment-15636815-20151115223513

BL, that's interesting. The goal, of course, with moving formatting code out of the table itself and into the CSS file was to eliminate extra stuff in the table that just gets in the way and sometimes confuses editors. As such, I'm not a big fan of your solution.

That doesn't mean I want to leave editors high and dry. I'm just not finished building the other things that will help. The key to the "no inline formatting" solution is the use of pre-loaded templates that appear when people create a new page. When we get a new contractor, for example, the user would enter the name (and year, if applicable), then click on "Create a new contractor." The system ten gives the user a full set of code for a contractor's main page, which comments on each line where the data should go. Enter the data, remove the comment (optional), repeat as necessary, publish. Easy!

None of this is to say that your idea has no merit. It does. It's not my preferred style, but I'm not in charge here. Once I have at least one example of the pre-loaded templates in place, we can ask the community to decide whether they'd rather use your idea, my idea, and blend of the two, or something else entirely

One thing is for certain: We cannot keep doing things the way we've been doing them. With no guidance except for past exampleswhich themselves contain little or no consistencyeditors will continue to enter data inconsistently and even incorrectly. Three years ago, that was not a very big deal. Today, the site is too big for that, and it's only going to get worse if we don't change things.