Thread:*-jester-*/@comment-5085162-20120530144134/@comment-5085162-20120531191116

@jester, the idea is that a tiny program could generate the alphabetized block table from an unordered source. Real UNIX works like that; there are literally hundreds of tiny programs that can do one thing well, and the skill in using it is to be able to compose those tiny programs to do what you want. I did that kind of thing all my career.

On the other hand, Mediawiki, which Wikia is based on, seems more like a massive monolith in the Micro$oft model, which "knows" everything you might want to do, so it allows you to do it only in the permitted way. The things I've tried to do (including something as simple as a counting macro) have not been possible, so I doubt that a trivial filter between some raw data and the content of the HTML is included in its world view. I'd like to be proven wrong.

@spicie, the onhover text is clearly something the HTML can do; the question is whether Mediawiki can be coerced into generating that HTML. (See the previous paragraph.) It's something I'd like to do (I think it'd be a good technique to use for the estate plot table I'm fiddling with on my profile page), but so far I haven't figured out how to get Mediawiki to generate the HTML.