Template:TOCfloat

Especially for articles which do not have a lede, a long Table Of Contents (TOC) can be visually unsettling -- "Hey, where's the article? There's just this long box!" Sometimes it's just the only right way to do things, as in Quotes/Speech. But for a more normal article like Daodan DLL, it would look bad if the article started after the lengthy TOC. Use this template to make the TOC a floating table, so that the article text wraps around it. See the "toclimit" classes in MediaWiki:Common.css for another way to avoid the problem of long TOCs, but note that TOCfloat also offers the optional use of "toclimit".

It's important to have a grasp of proper wiki article layout, because this template includes the magic word __TOC__, which determines the TOC's position within the article. Thus, in order to preserve the standard layout, this means that you should you have to place the template markup between the lede text (if there is any) and the first subheader in the article. The Daodan article above demonstrates proper layout with (1) a lede that describes the DLL briefly without the use of a section header, followed by (2) the TOC, followed by (3) the article's body with subheaders. The fact that the body is now wrapping around the TOC does not change the order of layout elements; it merely improves its appearance.

Optional parameters:

• "side" -- this is passed to the float property, so your only meaningful choices are "left" or "right" (default is "left")
• "width" -- e.g., "300px" or "30%"; this works in unusual ways: you can make the TOC more narrow than it would be normally (forcing line wrap on header names that exceed that width), but if you supply a width that is greater than the "auto" width (determined by the length of the longest header name), then the TOC stays at the "auto" width, but with a whitespace margin added to the right. When you use the template's default float:left style, this margin appears between the left-aligned TOC and the article text that wraps around it, which one could use to insert a small bit of extra space for aesthetic purposes. When you supply "side=right", however, excess width is still placed to the right of the TOC, making an undesirable white area as a sort of third column after the wrapped article text and the TOC.
• "limit" -- limits the TOC to a certain level of hierarchy; for instance, {{TOCfloat|limit=2}} would only show level 2 headers (==), keeping the table short.