Archive 1

RfC: Would a standard template for version history tables be helpful for software articles?

Summary: Should version history tables in software articles be generalized in terms of version stages, labels and colors? Jesus Presley (talk) 03:52, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Full description:
Proposal 1
Yes, color scheme from german Wikipedia
Colour Label/Meaning
Red #F06C47 Old release; no longer supported
Lt.green #CEE482 Older release; still supported
Green #9DD12F Current release
Orange #FCB058 Test release / preview version
Yellow#FCED77 Future release
Proposal 2
Yes, color scheme as concluded from english Wikipedia
Colour Label/Meaning
Red salmon Old release; no longer supported
Yellow khaki Older release; still supported
Green #A0E75A Current release
Purple Plum Test release / preview version
Blue skyBlue Future release
Proposal 3
No, keep current situation
Description:
  • "Quasi-standard" by silent agreement, with irregularities
  • Accessibility only if author knows how to
  • Version tables are formatted manually
  • Definition of version stages diffuse
  • Individual version stages possible (plus)
  • No extra work (plus)

Note: I modified my original post because the display of the example tables was cluttered, also the choice between several options had to be made clearer. I didn't mess with statements of other users.

Updated proposals 1+2 as result of comments below:
Proposal 1.1 (1.0 updated)
Colour Label/Meaning
Red salmon link Old release; no longer supported
Lt.green #CEE482 link Older release; still supported
Green #9DD12F link Current release
Orange #FCB058 link Preview or beta release
Blue skyBlue link Future release or developer version
Proposal 2.1 (2.0 updated)
Colour Meaning
Red #salmon link Old release; no longer supported
Yellow #FCED77 link Older release; still supported
Green #A0E75A link Current release
Purple #E6A7E6 link Preview or beta release
Blue skyBlue link Future release or developer version
Merged 2 + 1
Colour Meaning
Red #salmon link Old release; no longer supported
Yellow #FCED77 link Older release; still supported
Green #A0E75A link Current release
Orange #FCB058 link Preview or beta release
Blue skyBlue link Future release or developer version

Comments
Hi.
Currently, in English Wikipedia, we have our own style. See articles like Internet Explorer 10#Release history, Firefox (actually Template:Firefox usage share) or Google Chrome#Release history.
Color Meaning
Red Old release
Green Stable release
Blue Beta release
Purple Dev release
But in my humble opinion, this is a Color of the bike shed issue. It must not be put into the manual of style without strong consensus. Please consider calling in additional input. RfC, village pump or various WikiProjects (software, computing, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) may be used to attract input.
Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 21:11, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
P.S. Fragments should not end with period. Also, I forgot to mention: I don't like it. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 21:37, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Good ideas to use such a template, but why with colours? As someone with (slight) visual acuity problems, I hate that people don't think about those who have problems. There is nothing wrong with the default black on white that most of Wikipedia is published in. --Biker Biker (talk) 21:39, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Hi. Actually, template documentation page says this template ({{version}}) populates accessibility data. (No more explanation is supplied.) In addition, as much as I appreciate your attention for visually-impaired people, I find that people blessed with the gift of sight also need attention. Wikipedia, for the most part, is black and white. (Images add color but are constantly removed with reason that amount to excuses.) Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 22:29, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Thanks so far for the comments. Accessibility is provided by replacing the color codes with replacement information inside the "title" attribute. As I only translated the template, I cannot report of more accessibility features. The color scheme (of course) is replacable, it can easily be adopted to the one that CN Lisa mentioned. However, above colors are not consistant at all across en:WP. IMHO it makes sense to introduce one standard - and I didn't find any styleguide that decides on this. I am happy with differing styles for (german) de:WP and en:WP. Which means: I'd be happy to adopt the quasi-standard colors above. Jesus Presley (talk) 23:25, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
I moved the discussion section from the styleguide talk page here, to the template talk page, as implied by Codename Lisa, including a RfC marker. Please comment. Jesus Presley (talk) 01:24, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
I have to support the recoloring. It looks nicer and easier to read than the old coloring. --Nathan2055talk - contribs 17:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
To clearify: That means you support Prop. 1, above? --Jesus Presley (talk) 18:15, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 1. As nominator, I support the "new" color scheme, because it is readable and gives an harmonic picture when used in information-packed tables. Blue links have high contrast with all backgrounds (not in the current scheme, where blue as a background is involved). I'd be also happy with proposal 2 - more important then colors is the fact that we agree on one standard. --Jesus Presley (talk) 00:31, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 2 or 3 Personally not a fan of 1, as I think yellow should more logically lead to red (as software ages). Not keen on the flip from current with blue/purple as it seems unnecessarily disruptive to change it. Current implementation seems to work, but adding a layer for old but still supported may have merit. More documentation may be a good idea. --Nouniquenames 05:05, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
To answer the "flipping values" issue: I accumulated the use of color codes from WP - and esp. the BG-color choice for beta, dev, test and future releases are rather arbitrary across WP, as you can see in my collected colors list. This naturally became confusing. That's why I am proposing a standard. But I support your argument and I will modify this. Jesus Presley (talk) 06:08, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 1, but with the lighter, more readable red of proposal 2 (if you're colorblind, black on darker red is almost impossible to read). Prop 1's colors have semantic meaning (indicating "safe" vs. "warning" levels, basically), while half of those in prop 2 are entirely arbitrary and seem to just be cutesy decoration for its own sake. (Purple for development version? Why not taupe or puce?) PS: Beta, Dev and Preview/Test release are all pretty much the same thing. What distinction are we trying to get at here? Why would we have a "Future" one, when WP:NOT#CRYSTALBALL is policy? — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:22, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
Good point, however, usually the future release is noted as the (one) next announced release - and the announcement (with planned features) can usually be sourced precisely. Check this example: Ubuntu. On the other hand, here we also have an CRYSTALBALL example: Chevereto. My idea: rephrase to planned release, encourage editors (via documentation) not to use speculative information. Jesus Presley (talk) 06:54, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
Just to clearify this: Wouldn't the important destinction be:
  • Beta (open), alpha(open), test or preview version: = published
  • Dev, pre-alpha or future version: = unpublished?
Taking in account the info from Software release life cycle
  • Proposal 2. The color code is more distinct and therefore slightly easier to read than that of Proposal 1. If anyone wants to see my argument in detail, you are welcome to read my recent reply on User:Jesus Presley's User Talk, which I am going to copy to my own User Talk Page also. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 02:27, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 2 (with modified colors, below). As Willstro notes, more distinct. I feel the same way about red in Proposal 1 as Nouniquenames. — Hex (❝?!❞) 20:38, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 2.1 has best use of colors. Definitely not 1.1. Merged 2+1 would be an acceptable alternative. — MrDolomite • Talk 19:46, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 2. Very simple traffic light paradigm that everyone is familiar with for red (danger) - yellow (caution) - green (go). Future releases can really be whatever color we want, but Blue & Purple are the most distinctive colors remaining, so they work. SnowFire (talk) 03:34, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 2: there should be consistency throughout Wikipedia for the sake of usability. I slightly prefer initial Proposal 2 for its choice of X11 color names, though any widely-accepted scheme would be OK for me. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talktrack) 20:26, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Proposal 2 (2.1) Proposal 1's colors look better, but proposal 2's make more sense, as SnowFire pointed out. HueSatLum ? 01:58, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Result

Taking in suggestions and comments, I deduced that

  1. A standard for version history tables is wanted (but no necessity).
  2. Both versions can be considered, respectively improved.

Therefore I decided to use these colors in the template from now:

Compromise from suggestions above
Colour Meaning
Red #salmon link Old release; no longer supported
Yellow #FCED77 link Older release; still supported
Green #A0E75A link Current release
Orange #FCB058 link Preview or beta release
Blue skyBlue link Future release or developer version

Thanks for all your contributions, of course I welcome everybody to work on this template as well. Jesus Presley (talk) 00:48, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I got an RFC bot message inviting comment. My main comment would be:
Less can be more...
Colour Meaning
Red #FDB3AB link Old release; no longer supported
Yellow #FEF8C6 link Older release; still supported
Green #D4F4B4 link Current release
Orange #FED1A0 link Preview or beta release
Blue #C1E6F5 link Future release or developer version
In all honesty, if it were my design, I might even lighten them a bit more than I did here.
Big solid blocks of bright colour overwhelm the textual content, and can appear quite "glaring" in my opinion.
Just something to think about... Begoontalk 10:37, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks Begon, I will try to execute exemplify your suggestion in detail. Your argument is valid, I think it follows the suggested general use of colors in WP. Jesus Presley (talk) 10:44, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
If you do a lot of this, you will be surprised just how little colour you actually need to make quite a distinct visual difference, without making everything just too bright and bold. You could easily go quite a bit lighter than I did above, and still differentiate the entries, whilst being more soothing on the eye. Consistency is the Holy Grail, though, there's nothing more jarring than a whole bunch of different colour formats co-existing at once. Begoontalk 10:59, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I really don't think the color code compromise already reached in our earlier discussion is too bright or bold. After all, we're only coloring the extreme left column of a table, not the whole Article. That being said, it would be nice if the Green were consistently #A0E75A, instead of the vomit shade of Green I currently see on the Dreamweaver Article. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 23:29, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
I missed to change the green value (Green: #9DD12F -> #A0E75A), done now. However, didn't really look vomity on my monitor :). Jesus Presley (talk) 15:10, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Onward and upward

Now that this Template is created, this Talk Page should probably focus on fulfilling the standard To-Do List already posted. We should also Archive the initial creation discussion, although for some reason every time I wrote an Archive Box for that Section it would come out wrong and look weird. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:35, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Talk page is now auto-archived after 90 days. Hope that's OK. Also, some improvements were made to the german original template, making it independant from other (smaller) templates. I will try to merge those changes. Mateng (talk) 17:54, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Microsoft Office: Version tables task force

I find it odd that the above Section closed before it was created. It must be a glitch of some sort in the date stamps.

Anyway, the Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are likely to have highly trafficked Articles here on Wikipedia, seeing as they are the most widely used applications in the world's most widely used suite. None of their respective Articles currently use this now-standardized Template (which, I'm proud to say, I was part of that original discussion).

Therefore, I respectfully propose a task force to implement this Template on all software Articles whose subjects are part of the MS Office suite, including the 3 programs (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) that I mentioned above. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:09, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The closure of the above section is in order, the answer is to the right - this was extensively discussed already, but it had just been freshly archived when I asked the question :-) As for MS Office, I'd suggest "just do it" - David Gerard (talk) 12:54, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The red is a bit garish

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


I wanted to change the red in LibreOffice, but I see it's part of the template. It's a bit dark and a bit saturated. (Personally I'd rather a dull grey.) Was there any particular reason for the red? - David Gerard (talk) 22:25, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

There was a clear consensus for consistency in version history tables and a template to support it. Discussion on colors was converging toward option 2 when a compromise (the current version, sometimes referred to as 2.1) was proposed, and that seems to have been in place without objection since. However, there is not sufficient discussion of that option to claim a clear consensus for it. --j⚛e deckertalk 04:51, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello, Gerard; Hello, Joe. As a matter of fact, coloring of the table is a matter of optional style. According to WP:MOS, optional styles are treated in a first-chosen-first-served basis. So, Gerard, as long as you are the first to choose a color of the table of the article which you have had a significant hand in developing, no one in Wikipedia can force you to change it to anything else with vote superiority alone. A manifest example of optional style is date style: The majority of the world is using day-first date formats but day-first dates in Wikipedia have no privilege over month-first dates.
Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 22:50, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
The accessibiity failure noted below may be a reason to reexamine the issue - David Gerard (talk) 00:03, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Loop or nested If/Else for "Support status" text column

Other commenters have expressed concern for blind or visually impaired readers who have their browsers integrated with text-to-voice programs, but also that such a text column would make the table "look less elegant" for the rest of us who can see it. So, I was thinking that we could implement some sort of programming loop or nested If/Else series that would adapt this Template to each browser. If the browser is hooked up to a voice-to-text application on that particular device, the algorithm would add a "Support status" text column to the right of the color-coded version numbers column. If the browser on a given device is not integrated with a voice-to-text program, the "Support status" column would be disabled on that particular copy of whichever browser happens to be downloaded to that device.

I hope everything I explained above makes sense.

Does this helping the blind and elegance "compromise" (for want of a better word) make sense to the rest of us here? The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:09, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Accessibility

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Unfortunately, this template is inaccessible to people with colour-blindness and some other visual disabilities (and won't help when printed in black & white), because it relies on colour to convey information; because the contrast between adjacent colours is insufficient; and because the information it conveys is not available to people who cannot see the page (e.g blind people who have pages read out loud to them by assistive software). This fails international standard web accessibility guidelines and our own Manual of style. The issue affects both the template, and tables which rely in its colour scheme. We need to find an alternative, accessible, method of conveying the information; probably by adding an extra column to tables with text values. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:14, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Mmm ... this is actually a problem.
These are two separate fixes: (1) extra column for version age, or some other way to make it accessible to screen readers (2) colours that degrade more gracefully to greyscale - David Gerard (talk) 11:44, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
Unlike the 'name' attribute, screen readers have variable support for the 'title' attribute and the Royal National Institute of Blind People outlines several problems with its use - certainly there's no guarantee that a screen reader will access the information. Those of us with defective colour vision are likely to be affected as well. The red (#FA735D) fails the colour difference part of Snook's Colour Contrast Check. It's a bit too saturated to allow black text to be easily read. It could be tweaked to something like #FF8471 (same hue, less saturation) to improve matters. The green (#A0E75A) would similarly benefit from being a touch lighter at something like #A7F15E. Unfortunately, improving the readability for colour difference between foreground and background makes the problem of differences in grey-scale equivalent even worse, although I doubt that any acceptable changes can make that functional. The real solution is to make sure that the "Old version, unsupported"/"Old version, still supported", etc. information is present in plain text. Trying to be clever and encoding the info is bound to run into trouble with some user agents and we have no control over what our readers choose to use. --RexxS (talk) 18:28, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
So we need to add a column, basically. And would tweaking the colours be worth anything? - David Gerard (talk) 20:54, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
My old, tired eyes find it easier to read black text on the lighter/less saturated backgrounds, so yes. And by meeting the W3C guidelines on colour difference we're demonstrating good practice that (hopefully) editors will emulate in the future. --RexxS (talk) 21:10, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Not relying on the colors, if the Article is well written

We are not relying solely on color code with this Template. On the contrary, the Template was created with the assumption that the information summarized in the Template is already written in the actual text of the respective Article. As long as that is the case, it shouldn't be a crime to have an additional summary that works for those of us with healthy color vision.

Anyone seriously looking up a software Article should actually read the Article anyway, whether their color vision is good or not. I brought up this very point when this very topic was discussed half a dozen times before this Template was created, and it remains valid. Unless either (A) color blind people are a much higher percentage of the population now than they were then, which I doubt considering these past discussions were all in the last 2 years or so, or (B) software Articles are that much more poorly written now than they were then, in which case editing this Template isn't the solution. The real solution, if B is true, is to edit the various software Articles so that this Template is in fact a mere augmentation and not something entirely relied upon as such.

The Red, Yellow, and Green used in this Template were originally the very same shades of those colors used in traffic lights. Whoever edited the Green to be that much more Yellowish-Green, I agree that that change should be reverted. Other than that, has anyone here read the Archived past discussions on this very topic? As I said above, this Template is not relied upon at all if the respective software Article is well-written; it is just a little something extra for those of us with healthy color vision and nothing more. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:28, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

To quote an old comment by User:Codename Lisa,
"Hi. Actually, template documentation page says this template ("version") populates accessibility data. (No more explanation is supplied.) In addition, as much as I appreciate your attention for visually-impaired people, I find that people blessed with the gift of sight also need attention. Wikipedia, for the most part, is black and white. (Images add color but are constantly removed with reason that amount to excuses.) Best regards, Codename Lisa"
This comment, not hard to find in the Archives, sums up the matter quite well. One last time, this Template is not exactly relied upon if the respective software Article is written as well as it should be. It is just something extra for those of us with healthy color vision, but even then, even if you have healthy color vision, it is still no substitute for a well-written Article that already mentions the oldest still-supported version as well as the newest stable release version of the respective program at the time that you are reading the Article. Not a substitute, but a nice augmentation. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:41, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
Sorry for the rant. Seriously, though, do my above replies and explanations make sense? The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:44, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
"What about the poor oppressed privileged people?" is an unconvincing argument, particularly when the colours in question are actively being a problem, as noted above. Furthermore, the guidelines the template presently violates have been noted above - David Gerard (talk) 10:40, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
There is a world of difference between enhancing the experience for those that can make use of it and failing to provide enhancement when we could. Nobody is going to argue that we shouldn't have images because blind visitors can't see them; but it is unforgiveable to disadvantage certain groups of visitors when a simple fix is available. The colours chosen do not have to have lousy contrast with black text, because equally useful colours are available that don't have that problem. So no, I don't see the sense in your argument - you're confusing things we can't do anything about with those that can be fixed simply if people just started giving a damn about others. That's the end of my rant. --RexxS (talk) 12:34, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
Good evening David Gerard and RexxS, I thought we were talking about getting rid of color code altogether, which, similar arguments for that have been presented in the past.
Now, if the issue is contrast with black text, let's use essentially the same colors but in lighter shades.
Same wavelengths on the rainbow, but slightly lighter...
Color Meaning
Red #FDB3AB link Former release, no longer supported
Yellow #FEF8C6 link Former release, still supported
Green #D4F4B4 link Current release
Orange #FED1A0 link Preview release (Beta)
Blue #C1E6F5 link Future release or developer version (Alpha)
How does this idea look to you guys? The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 04:11, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
Yeah, sorry if that wasn't clear. I don't think anyone wants to remove the colours - just replace them with non-problematic ones (and add a column to the table with the status in screen-readable words). As someone with good vision and good colour vision, those pastel shades look way nicer to me. @RexxS: how are those for you?
I think we should give this (say) a week, given the previous discussion - David Gerard (talk) 13:51, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm somewhat older than David and also have tritanomaly but I can read black text against those background colours clearly. The combinations all pass Snook's Colour Contrast Check with flying colours (groan). I agree with David we ought to wait in case there are more comments, but it looks good to me! Cheers --RexxS (talk) 14:03, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
So long as that's as well as an extra column, with text values, and not instead of it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:27, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
The column with text is something I think we should have, even though it will look slightly less elegant. I can't tell from looking at the template code if that can be implemented just in the template, or if we have to go fix every article ... - David Gerard (talk) 15:52, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Colours updated, need someone to add text column

Per the above discussion, I've lightened the colours to The Mysterious El Willstro's proposed colours above. There's presumably a long purge running in the job queue, but the effects should be visible in a while.

Looking at the horrible, horrible template code, I have no idea how to add a screen-reader-friendly text column to it. Anyone? - David Gerard (talk) 12:42, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the color update! I'm glad my suggestion went over so well! The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 10:19, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Implementing for Microsoft Office Articles

Just now, I implemented this Template for Microsoft Word (which is probably the, singular, most well-known software program in the world). Soon, let's do the same for the other Microsoft Office Articles, including Excel and PowerPoint. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 06:02, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Now implemented for Microsoft Excel. Coming soon for Microsoft PowerPoint. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 07:31, 9 April 2016 (UTC)
Now accomplished for Microsoft PowerPoint. That's the Big 3 for Microsoft Office! At this point, I would really like to see some other Editors involved again with implementation of this Template (on Articles concerning actively developed software). The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 06:07, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Reverted to revision 648113516 by Frietjes

Hello

I hope Rukario-sama, TheDJ, and YannickFran are notified and are seeing this.

Having observed multiple occurrences of aberrant behavior around this template around Wikipedia (example is rev. 720355016), things came to a head with revision 720508806 by Ziov, which had observed the entire Microsoft Windows article after this tag had become centered.

Having observed this piece of broken code:

|l=<div class="templateVersion l" {{{style|}}}">

...I decided there is probably more broken things and reverted the template to revision of 00:03, 21 February 2015‎ (UTC) by Frietjes.

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 13:45, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm not touching this anymore, I don't have time to decode the template soup, however, the HTML of this template is still broken and will soon no longer be accepted by the MediaWiki parser sometime this year. I suggest someone fixes it, before it is GUARANTEED to break pages. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:09, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Are you talking about the <div /> that should become an empty <div>...</div>? Also, can you give me more information about that change to "MediaWiki parser sometime this year"? Thanks. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 14:18, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
This code:
<div style="clear: left;" /></div>
...should become:
<div style="clear: left;"></div></div>
The second </div> belongs the entire block.
Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 14:22, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
@Codename Lisa: T89331, specifically T134423TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:47, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Color coding accessibility

The backgrounds in the "version" column are color coded and labeled in a way such that non-sighted users, and likely some color-blind users, cannot match colors to their labels. A possible solution might be to add text superscripts to version numbers. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 04:42, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi
How do you test what color-blind people see?
Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 06:23, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
Hi Matt, the template uses the title attribute and a hidden span tag as an explanation of the version state:
<td class="templateVersion c" style="background-color: #D4F4B4;" title="Current stable version" data-sort-value="3.0 Z"><span style="display: none;">Current stable version:</span><b>3.0</b></td>
In addition to that, we could introduce a small indicator in superscript - if that is what you suggested:
<td class="templateVersion c" style="background-color: #D4F4B4;" title="Current stable version" data-sort-value="3.0 Z"><span style="display: none;">Current stable version:</span><b>3.0</b><sup>c</sup></td>
Example:
Current stable version: 3.0 c 2012-06-23 Release to web
Future release: 4.0 f 2013-09-06 Future version
--Mateng (talk) 20:35, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Any progress on that additional indicator? What's needed to help? The Crab Who Played With The Sea (talk) 18:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

still supported somehow misleading

I'm refering to status "Older version, still supported". Many open source project are part of different long term support distributions. e.g. Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE. These distributions provide solid support for whatever version of the project was available during distribution release. e.g. `git-scm` project does not provide patches for anything earlier than 2.13 but such distros do support 2.9 or even 1.x versions of git. I'm not sure what the label should read exactly. Since the product might be non-open-source the label should apply to non-open-source products as well. I'm thinking about "Older version, supported by developer". Akostadi (talk) 18:17, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

"Latest preview version" vs "Preview version(s)"

Could "Latest preview version" be renamed to "Preview version" or "Preview versions" ?

As there could be more than one preview due to different or paralles development paths (e.g Windows 10)

And if only the latest preview should get this setting (cp) there is no more category left for a preview which is not the latest one.

If you set the not latest preview to (co) it would mislead cause it looks like an older non-preview release.

Especially here, people always "fight" about the term LATEST Preview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Windows_10_versions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_version_history

2001:16B8:243:F900:98B5:4518:7394:A276 (talk) 19:38, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Would like to add to the templateVersion class style a dark option

This template displays badly when a user has dark mode enabled. I simply would like to add to wherever templateVersion is coming from the option in the colored cells to NOT change the text color to white and keep the text black. Wiki Tables display fine unless a template has modified the background color, which this one has, and the white text on the colored background is unreadable even by someone without Accessibility needs.

The tag in the css that is needed around the additional options is: @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { } for each of the o, co, c, cp, and p options. WikiMathematician ([[User talk: WikiMathematician|talk]]) 00:02, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Add ability to tag versions as old but still receiving security updates.

Currently one can not indicate that a version is old but will still receive security updates (but no further support/features) with this template. This would be useful e.g. in the case of Xenforo where 1.5 will still receive security updates even after normal support was dropped.[1] Other projects might also profit from that.

The only issue that I currently see is that the obvious new color for that category doesn't really work out well as orange is used for latest preview. (Which I would expect "Older version, security updates" or something along that line to use) Maybe a different color (pink/purple/violette?) could be used for the latest preview? (Or turquoise if we want to go with a more rainbow-ish scheme) Alternatively such color could be used for the security updates. --Phoenix616 (talk) 17:51, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Isn’t this the “co” option? WikiMathematician (talk) 00:04, 16 July 2021 (UTC)