Thread:Achris/@comment-26414094-20150602114654/@comment-26273934-20150602120806

Don't worry and thanks for assembling those overviews! I should have asked myself, honestly, seeing how you were already doing item-related stuff and I really wasn't :-)

Glad we got the "conflict" sorted out without losing content in the process, wikis sometimes are crappy at handling that.

As a matter of fact, IL started out as a plain wikicode template. That format was easier to add new images to, but as it grew larger and larger, there actually was a noticeable performance hit (measured by Google PageSpeed, there might be better tools for the job) because large wikicode #switch constructs increase lookup times every time the template was called. This was my main motivation for converting to Lua modules, as it supports hashtable lookups which do not care about how large the image list is and provide constant lookup time. Hopefully that advantage offsets the slight syntax regression that is adding new images to the list.

Now, for the question of "small" vs. "regular" images, doing something about that distinction has been on my invisible to-do list for Template:IL for a while and have some ideas. I might take another stab later today, depending on what other things I feel like tackling first :)

And finally: IL is not my own invention, though I did more or less hi-jack it from its original author and added some features. Here's a blog post I started preparing once and that has been rotting for about a weeks already, and that contains a bit of history as well: User:Achris/ILblog