Editing Template:Mbox/doc (section)

=== Technical details ===

If you need to use special characters in the text parameter then you need to escape them like this:

<pre>
{{mbox
| text  = <div>
Equal sign = and a start and end brace { } work fine as they are.
But here is a pipe &amp;#124; and two end braces &lt;nowiki>}}&lt;/nowiki>.
And now a pipe and end braces &lt;nowiki>|}}&lt;/nowiki>.
</div>
}}
</pre>

{{mbox
| text  = <div>
Equal sign = and a start and end brace { } work fine as they are.
But here is a pipe &#124; and two end braces <nowiki>}}</nowiki>.
And now a pipe and end braces <nowiki>|}}</nowiki>.
</div>
}}

The <code>&lt;div></code> tags that surround the text in the example above are usually not needed. But if the text contains line breaks then sometimes we get weird line spacing. This especially happens when using vertical dotted lists. Then use the div tags to fix that.

This template uses CSS classes in [[MediaWiki:Common.css]] for most of its looks, thus it is fully skinnable.

This template calls {{tl|mbox/core}} which holds most of the code for {{tl|mbox}}, while {{tl|mbox}} itself does parameter preprocessing.

Internally this meta-template uses HTML wikimarkup instead of wikimarkup for the table code. That is the usual way we make meta-templates since wikimarkup has several drawbacks. For instance it makes it harder to use [[m:Help:ParserFunctions|parser functions]] and some special characters in parameters.

The default images for this meta-template are in png format instead of svg format. The main reason is that some older web browsers have trouble with the transparent background that MediaWiki renders for svg images. The png images here have hand optimised transparent background colour so they look good in all browsers. Note that svg icons only look somewhat bad in the old browsers, thus such hand optimisation is only worth the trouble for very widely used icons.

For more technical details see the [[Template talk:mbox|talk page]] and the "See also" links below.