Template talk:Eqm

Recent change

I reverted the recent change to the template; I'm not sure what the problem was but I was not seeing an image being rendered. In the article I was looking at (Acid dissociation constant) all the {{eqm}} instances were rendering as the alt text, "is in equilibrium with", instead of the image. Mike Christie (talk) 21:33, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Why 13px?

Is there a reason 13px is used as the default size of this symbol? Shouldn't it be scaled according to the current fontsize instead, such as 1em?—Tetracube (talk) 16:29, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

13px is a small as the image will go and still display correctly. MediaWiki won't allow us to have variable size based on a font-metric, although 13px looks OK to me at most normal browser font sizes. Physchim62 (talk) 05:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I see. Unfortunately it looks too tiny for me because I have a high resolution screen and set my minimum font size to 20pt. What's the rationale behind not using variable sizes? Not that it's a big deal; a single symbol being too small doesn't bother me too much.—Tetracube (talk) 16:29, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I've taken it back up to 15px, which should hopefully provide a compromise for all users. When we get proper support for Unicode character ⇌ (U+21CC) it will be simple to change the template to display that. I'll also see if we can get a proportional size, but I guess the answer will still be "no". Physchim62 (talk) 13:58, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Also, what is the reason the Unicode character ⇌ (U+21CC) is not used instead? (not enough font support?)—Tetracube (talk) 16:34, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Font support is one reason. A second reason is that, with the image, we can have alt-text for screen readers whereas alt-text in Unicode fonts is less than wonderful for the time being. It's worthwhile having a specific fix for this character because, if it doesn't render correctly, the resulting chemical equation is extremely difficult to decipher. The full discussion can be found at Wikipedia talk:Accessibility/Archive 6#Equilibrium symbol. Physchim62 (talk) 05:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Using images in lieu of text creates a greater accessibility problem. Wouldn't it be better to use something like ⇌:

<span title="is in equilibrium with">⇌</span>

That you can still hover over it to see what it means, but still get the real symbol (instead of the awkward replacement text) when you copy and paste a chemical formula into another medium. — CharlotteWebb 21:37, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

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BTW, (at 15px) has noticeably blurred lower horizontal line, hasn’t it? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 10:47, 29 June 2013 (UTC)