Forum:Temporary forums/Replacing docpic

Currently, a number of pages use of {{docpic}} and similar templates to produce rotating slideshows of images in the infobox. This is better than just having a single image in the infobox as it allows us to better represent the subject matter when they have multiple incarnations. However, it leads to some very annoying issues.

Firstly, it can cause the loading of pages to be very slow on less powerful computers and, even after loading, remain stuttery and cause the slowdown of the entire page. Secondly and perhaps more quantifiable and significant is how these templates display on mobile. Take a look at the Doctor's page with the mobile skin. As you can see, images appear stacked on top of each other, taking up a lot of vertical space. This leads to none of the actual infobox being visible when semi-collapsed which defeats the whole point of having a semi-collapsed state. The effect is worse on mobile devices where screen real-estate is at a premium.

The solution is to replace these with tabbed galleries. These are already in place on a handful of pages, such as Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, and entirely fix both of the issues I presented above. Notice how the images appear side-by-side on mobile. If they cross the width of the screen, they become scrollable horizontally which is far easier to navigate and takes up far less space. Creating this effect is easy, simply requiring placing something like

|image       = <gallery>
Jekyll.jpg|Henry Jekyll
Hyde.jpg|Edward Hyde
</gallery>

in the infobox. This is also much more extendable than the slide show templates, allowing new images to be added and multiple images to be introduced on new pages much more easily. It also removes any issues with adjusting timings (which can only be done via CSS) as this is no longer relevant.

I hope that this proposal can be passed quickly as I feel it is relatively trivial, but we'll see. Thoughts? Bongo50 ☎ 20:49, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

This is straightforward enough, and so objectively a quality of life improvement, that I wouldn't have minded if you'd just gone ahead and done it without polling the community! Enthusiastic and unequivocal support. – n8 (☎) 20:53, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with n8, and the proposal is well-reasoned and sound. I've occasionally experienced issues with the rotating galleries glitching or loading slowly, so I'd welcome this. Making a tabbed gallery also allows for each image to have a caption, even if it's simply "1" "2" "3" etc. in the case of the Doctors, which is somewhat handy for newcomers.

Quick question: take the Doctor's main tabbed gallery then, would the first image be of the most recent Doctor, or would it always be of the first Doctor with users able to tab through them chronologically? FractalDoctor ☎ 21:00, 23 January 2023 (UTC)