Template:Top icon/doc

This is a metatemplate used to help build top icons, little (usually 15x15 pixels) icons in the top-right area of (mostly) userpages and user talk pages.

Usage
Extra options:
 * style       = add this to the style of the body
 * width       = use a different width for the images. For icon_nr to function, all uses of topicon on a page, require the same width.

Any top icons that use this template are safe for sitenotices etc. However, when sitenotices are active, the icons are likely differently aligned and may cross the header line. ATM there is no way to fix this, and user top icons have a lower priority than the top icons for articles (which do work in all cases). However if you use this template, your icons will be automatically fixed permanently once we do find a solution.

Example
Creates three icons, from left ---> right, account creator, rollback, autoreviewer.

Purpose
The top icons are a hack. They originate from the protection symbols. The only supported top icons are the four used in article space; the protection lock, the spoken article speaker icon , the good article symbol and the featured article star. Editors have been increasingly using the same trick to add custom icons to their userpages. However, due to how the icons are implemented, they have a tendency to break rather easily, for instance when sitenotices are active. Because it is impossible to correct this for each and every userpage every time the top icons are broken (not to mention a waste of valuable editor time), a new template (top icon) and class (topicon) were introduced to make it simpler to support the icons. Note that officially, the top icons on userpages are allowed to break at any time. Other technical changes that are important to the entire mediawiki software or changes to article space will always be more important than keeping the userspace top icons working. This template is therefore meant to simplify support, not to guarantee it.

Technical details
CSS is used to move a small piece of HTML from the content area of a wikipage to somewhere else on that page, usually in the top-right at the same height as the title of the wikipage. Because CSS is used, the icons require specific CSS for each individual skin. Currently only Monobook, Modern and Vector are supported.


 * Each top icon should use the class "topicon". This is required to correct the position of the icon for each skin.
 * The top icons are hidden with " " by default. The skin-specific CSS unhides them, so that the icons are only visible in skins that support the icons.
 * The skin-specific CSS determines the vertical position of top icons. Thus the style option " " should not be used by user top icons.
 * Top icons use the CSS property " " to determine how far from the right of the page the icon should be; article namespace icons, however, have fixed positions.
 * The property " " is used by skin-specific CSS to correct the default right offset if needed. This is also used by the lede edit section gadget to correct offset even further.
 * If individual top icons require vertical offset relative to other topicons, they can use  or   properties.