Template:Ambox/doc

This is the ambox or article message box meta-template.

It is used to build article message box templates. It offers several different colours, uses default images if no image parameter is given and it has some other features.

This meta-template uses the ambox CSS classes in MediaWiki:Common.css. The classes can also be used directly in a wikitable if special functionality is needed.

Usage
Simple usage example:

Complex example:

Article message box types
The following examples use different type parameters but use no image parameters thus they use the default images for each type.

Other images
The default images shown above are mostly for convenience. In many cases it is more appropriate to use more specific images. These examples use the image parameter to specify an image other than the default images.

Special
Some other parameter combinations.

Parameters
List of all parameters:

type
 * If no type parameter is given the template defaults to type notice. That means it gets a blue side bar.

image
 * No parameter = If no image parameter is given the template uses a default image. Which default image it uses depends on the type parameter.
 * An image = Should be an image with usual wiki notation. 40px - 50px width are usually about right depending on the image height to width ratio. (Images over 52 pixels width will cause padding problems.) For example:
 * none = Means that no image is used.
 * blank = Means that no image is used but an empty area the same size as a default image is used, which means that text in the message box gets aligned well with other article message boxes. (See the "special" examples above.)
 * blank = Means that no image is used but an empty area the same size as a default image is used, which means that text in the message box gets aligned well with other article message boxes. (See the "special" examples above.)

imageright
 * No parameter = If no imageright parameter is given then no image is shown on the right side.
 * An image = Should be an image with usual wiki notation. 40px - 50px width are usually about right depending on the image height to width ratio. (Images over 52 pixels width will cause padding problems.) For example:
 * Anything = Any other object that you want to show on the right side.
 * Anything = Any other object that you want to show on the right side.

style
 * Optional CSS values used by the entire message box table. Without quotation marks  but with the ending semicolons  . For example:

textstyle
 * Optional CSS values used by the text cell. For example:

text
 * The message body text.

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

&lt;/nowiki>. And now a pipe and end braces &lt;nowiki>|}}&lt;/nowiki>. }}

. And now a pipe and end braces |}}. }}

The  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.

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 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:Ambox.