Not sure how you can decide which to use. In some cases inline is much more sensible, e.g. "It is {{convert|50|km|miles}} high"

Maybe add a parameter in the templatedata?

Not possible for Parsoid to automatically know what is the right thing to do. Requires some templatedata information about serialization preferences.

In T111674#1616656, @Trizek-WMF wrote:

Maybe add a parameter in the templatedata?

That's T64147: Add an option in TemplateData to specify desired wikitext whitespace formatting of parameters.

In T111674#1616658, @ssastry wrote:

Not possible for Parsoid to automatically know what is the right thing to do. Requires some templatedata information about serialization preferences.

Should we turn this into a Once-T64147-is-solved-Parsoid-should-listen-to-it?

I get an other feedback which may be related: a user expect VE to recognize where a Template is not supposed to be inserted. Like an infobox in the middle of a sentence.
If we can indicate something about serialization in a way or an other, it may be possible to choose a Template position in the text?

Now we've (finally!) added this feature to TemplateData, it'd be great if this could be done soon-ish. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/243138/13/Specification.md details the specification of what counts as the format to use.

Adding a parameter to templatedata to set preferences for formatting templates in wikitext requires having templatedata for every template. With a lot of templates still missing template data this might become a trap. Or, I would rather prefer 'block' as default than 'inline'. Without templatedata or without the parameter being set this would format the wikitext as written under Description under Expectation:. I do agree there are some cases inline use is much more preferable. My guess is that those case are small in number compared to the other case, and are more likely to already have templatedata.

This decision was made in T64147: Add an option in TemplateData to specify desired wikitext whitespace formatting of parameters and this isn't really the venue, but will reply here:

In T111674#1804754, @AdHuikeshoven wrote:

Adding a parameter to templatedata to set preferences for formatting templates in wikitext requires having templatedata for every template. With a lot of templates still missing template data this might become a trap.

I don't understand? Yes, to be useful every template needs its TemplateData to be written.

Or, I would rather prefer 'block' as default than 'inline'. Without templatedata or without the parameter being set this would format the wikitext as written under Description under Expectation:. I do agree there are some cases inline use is much more preferable. My guess is that those case are small in number compared to the other case, and are more likely to already have templatedata.

I think you're under-estimating how badly breaking this would be for the majority of uses. There are quite a few templates, especially ones inside infoboxes and succession boxes, where setting the wrong layout means they do not work. Inline is the current behaviour and only rarely has issues. This would not be the case if we reversed the default.

James,

Thanks for the reply. Typing from phone. Watching television, terror in
Paris. Romaine sees some blockers including this one.

I had an irc conversation with a Dutch user who doesn't want to be quoted.
For him ve might have been introduced to anonomous users yesterday on nl
wp.

Feel good have a nice day a good weekend. Peace love and hugs from Holland.

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Change 264043 had a related patch set uploaded (by Subramanya Sastry):
WIP: Fetch and use templatedata

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/264043

Change 264043 merged by jenkins-bot:
Fetch and use templatedata while serializing transclusions

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/264043

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/271933/ is the followup that needs to be completed before this is ready for deploy. This followup was necessitated after round trip testing revealed that the first patch introduce lots of dirty diffs for some inline-format transclusions.

This caused T128337: TemplateData API should not return a default format if it is not set (currently defaults to inline) and T128319: Extra lines being inserted in edited transclusion wikitext serialisation when “block” format due to unexpected extra spaces.