User talk:Mzajac/East Slavic languages

Having problems with HTML tables? The cavalry arrives! :) Halibutt 09:43, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

Hi!

Well, if you have some time on your hands.... I'd keep at it, but between work and the holidays, I probably won't be able to get to it until the weekend.

I thought I would build a table that captures some more of the detail of Daniel's PDF, because I find the dialect information interesting. You can see what I was aiming for at eastslavic.html (looks great in Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Opera 7.5; mostly broken in MSIE).

The table grid is good, but the borders aren't there yet in MSIE. I've done a lot of the formatting using colgroups and cols. MSIE doesn't recognize these, and Wikipedia doesn't allow them in markup, so it all has to be re-done with plain table-row, table-cell formatting—might even have to nest tables, but I hope not.

The other question is how or whether to incorporate the other dialects and pidgins into the table, and we should probably get some input from Daniel before deciding. My guess is that Rusyn would be a sliver within the left side of Modern Ukrainian, occupying the full height of the Modern Period, because it's considered by some to be an independent language. Lemko and Boyko would be listed inside the South-Western Ukrainian box. Don't how Trasianka and Surzhyk fit in, but maybe they belong above in the respective language box, below the title, but above the regional dialects. Or are they regional? And I'm not clear on the relationship of "literaturnij jazyk" and "prostaja mova" in the table.

Finally, my table is reasonably clear, but it's quite busy with all of the lines. I thought that when it's finished, I wold try formatting it using tone to define the rows and white gaps of various thickness for the borders.

Cheers, Michael Z.

Did you see the rewriting of history at Wikipedia:Russian wikipedians' notice board#News? It's damned funny, but harmless, so I think it's best just to let it go. —Michael Z.