Template:Glossary link/doc

Usage

The template {{glossary link}} and its variant {{glossary link internal}} ({{gli}} for short) are templates for creating structured links to particular entries in topical glossaries (e.g. the {{clangloss}} template).

{{Glossary link}} is a meta-template for creating templates for specific major glossary articles; it is not usually used directly in an article. {{gli}} is usually used directly in the glossary article itself. Please categorize any derived, topical glossary link templates that use this meta-template into Category:Glossary link templates (this is usually done at the bottom of the template's /doc page, so that the category is not inside the template itself and it not accidentally transcluded into the articles that use the template).

The documentation below explains how to use them for your topic's template-structured glossary. Like the {{dfn}} wrapper, and the glossary {{term}} template, it uses the <dfn> HTML element properly. (Note that {{glossary link internal}} necessarily does not use it; <dfn> should only be used once per term on a single page, at the defining appearance of it.)

{{Glossary link}} creates a normal blue link. To prevent the "sea of blue" effect, {{Glossary link internal}} uses the light dashed underline style that has become a de facto Web standard for definitional markup.

Tech detail: By using an internal <span>...</span> with its own independent title attribute for a tool tip, it sets this up in a way that does not violate the very geeky and backasswards HTML5 specs on the handing of the title attribute of <dfn>, which is the exact term defined, not its definition.

Parameters

Each version of the template takes up to three case-sensitive, parameters for its data:

• |glossary=the title of the glossary article to be linked to
  • This is part of the URL to be generated; it cannot contain any styling, templates, HTML, or other markup.
• |term=the term entry in the glossary to be linked to  (or any {{anchor}} for it)
  • This is part of the URL to be generated; it cannot contain any styling, templates, HTML, or other markup.
  • A double quote (") character must be escaped as " or the tooltip will break. Glossary-specific templates based on this meta-template need to mention this prominently in their documentation.
  • This parameter can also be done as |1= or the first unnamed parameter. It must not be unnamed when creating a glossary-specific template from the meta-template, because you cannot guarantee that input will not contain a = character.
• |text=the actual text in the article to be linked from, if different from the term linked to
  • This parameter can be styled, templated, etc. (though cannot contains links – it's going to become the link). Styling can also be applied before and after the entire template, of course.

Limitations: The glossary and term parameters cannot have any HTML or wiki markup; they are basically parts of URLs (namely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/glossary#term).

A |color= parameter allows the color of the text to be changed. This should only be done when the rest of the text is also another color for some reason, e.g. because of white text in a dark-background table cell in a navbox or infobox. The parameter will accept established HTML/CSS color names (e.g. white) and hex values (e.g. #FFFFFF), and is spelled "color" since this is the spelling used by HTML and CSS.

Some little-used parameters that are there just in case:

• |id=an_ID – an anchor ID (no spaces, must begin with alphabetic letter) for #linking and possibly other purposes
• |style=arbitrary:css; – CSS directives for custom-styling the instance
• |class=css_class – a CSS class or classes (separated by spaces not commas if more than one); by default it already include glossary-link or glossary-link-internal (in the template with the respectively matching name) for custom user CSS.

See also

• {{glossary}}, {{glossary end}}, {{term}}, and {{defn}}, the glossary structure templates
• {{dfn}} the more general <dfn> template