Talk:Statute of Westminster 1931


 * Was there any point to the reformatting? The reformatting breaks the Wiki-indexing of sections (hence the manual table-of-contents) and puts style over substance. It should be reverted to the earlier style (which btw is consistent with the rest of the Wikisource UK-law pages) to better reflect the structure of the document, but not without acknowledging T. Mazzei's good faith in editing. 202.89.159.175 22:25, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

The point of reformatting was maintain as much of the original document formatting as possible by putting the section headings to the side (either the right or the left) of the text, as is standard for Acts, Statutes, Regulations, etc.

Automatic wikitext (headings, TOC) is nice for something like Wikipedia article, or for even for most literary works, but less so for more complicated documents like these. Having a bold summary header over every section (often nearly as long, or in some cases longer, than the actual section text) is not only ugly (in my opinion), it is distracting, breaks up the texts, and makes them more difficult to read. Having the headings to the side, as is standard, allows a reader to read the text of the document in an uninterrupted mannor, or to scan the headings on the side to find the section you are searching for.

Automatic TOC is also nice, especially in a continually changing document like in Wikipedia. A manual TOC is slightly more work to set up, but since we are talking about fixed content, once it works, there's little to maintain. Manually inserting the TOC allows it to match the actual document, like so:
 * 144. blah blah blah
 * 144.(1) blah blah blah
 * 144.(1) blah blah blah

The automatic TOC in all Laws, Statutes, etc., but especially in longer documents, results in sillyness like:
 * 2.42 Section 144. blah blah blah
 * 2.42.1 Section 144.(1) blah blah blah
 * 2.42.1 Section 144.(1) blah blah blah

Which again is both ugly (in my opinion), and makes the document harder to read, since it makes it harder to find the relevant section you are looking for.

I would also like to say that the "standard" way of formatting UK-Law, and most other documents here, is the standard only by default. It is standard because it is the only way to mark up the text without going outside wiki headers&mdash;which is all many editors know&mdash;not because it is the best way of doing so. --T. Mazzei 06:49, 17 April 2007 (UTC)