> From: "Don Sheldon" <don.sheldon@xxxxxxxxx> > > stopped and rewound (or so I thought). Further, you caught the brunt of > > that peevishness because you happened to be the last to post--not fair > > of me at all. > > Whew, I feel better now. Apology happily accepted. Great, thank you. > I sincerely will try to sandbox something up when I get a chance. May I suggest that you use Marc's existing User Page Sandbox as a good spot, if only to consolidate our options? http://rabbits.continuation.org/wiki/User:Magus/Sandbox/Userbox_Examples I, too, will give it a whirl--I think I can probably hack an Icehouse InfoBox (and an instance of a call for one) to make something workable. We'll see.... :) > From: Marc Hartstein <marc.hartstein@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > *not* nesting templates, as doing so leads to problems. I'm not sure if > it was for reasons of server efficiency or because they felt in the long > run it made maintainence even more headachey, but it was very The latter is what concerned me, but with only one "level" of instantiation/nesting, it ought to be fairly stable. I imagine that a nest of a nest of a nest (or two nested children of a parent that takes multiple children types) could quickly become a headache of interdependencies; but Don has convinced me that a single level would be straight-forward (not to mention educational: these are SIMPLE boxes, so even I ought to be able to parse the code and inheritance, once I can see the base and an implementation side-by-side). The point about server impact, however, has we thinking further. There was a little inkling--a small quiet voice in my head--when I was posting my last post that went along the lines of "Hmmm... so a call to my user page will result in about fifteen server-side 'includes,' in addition to the specific template and icon downloaded to my browser." Do any of the more code-savvy Rabbits know how much of an impact a single instantiation causes, when an HTML page has to call another (hidden) page to process an include? I mainly dismissed my initial concern by imagining how many such server-side transactions occur to display ONE page of a forum, with its 20 or 30 calls to database records with, oh, 15 fields each. Compared to that, server-side-including less than 1 KB per badge to build up the final rendering of the badge in HTML for the browser seems trivial. But I'm not sure, so...? Thanks for thinking about it, guys; David