Got an interesting idea for the purpose of preventing page breaks due to overloading.

Objective: Provide a visual data capacity early warning system so judicious page splits can be implemented before a page breakage occurs.

How it works: A piece of coding that checks the the data a page contains versus the total data capacity of the page, then gives visual feedback on the page consisting of a metallic circle with a color and percentage inside (to accommodate color blindness). Blue for 0-20%, Green for 21-40%, Yellow for 41-60%, orange for 61-80%, and red for 81-100%.

Problems: How to implement it so that one wouldn't have to manually put it in every page?

There is already a page size indicator — the numbers at the bottom left, which is the article's character count. I see no need to gin up a fancy graphical one.

Alternatively, how about an edit warning when a page gets into "too big" territory? Something like "This page is approaching the maximum permitted filesize, please consider splitting it appropriately", with a link to some page-split guidelines?

Ah! I've wondered what those numbers were all this time...

^ Also a pretty good idea. Question being where do we draw the line. Do we draw it at 75%, 80%, or 85%.

The Big Page Lock thread is flagging pages once they get to 400Kb, I think, so somewhere around there, probably.

At the very least, the character count should also say something like "Once the article reaches 400K, it should be split by medium." I know I keep forgetting the number in question.

Fighteer, curiosity pecks me: what does the counter at the bottom of the pages exactly represent? Back when splitting the largest page in the wiki, I could confirm that it's not the source size, and it does not seem to fit the generated HTML size either (even when I tried to remove pretty much everything that wasn't the actual content container).

edited 4th Apr '12 1:14:18 PM by SilentReverence

I forget now what Eddie said the number represents. I thought it was the rendered HTML.

It's character count.