Usamah M. Ali wrote:
Hello,
- Why MediaWiki uses mono fonts on all the <textarea> elements
related to editing?
It doesn't -- that's the default of your browser. (Unless your browser is Safari, in which case it defaults to a Sans Serif font.)
And would changing that to other font(s) cause problems?
It makes ASCII art harder to edit; otherwise, no problems. :)
The other reply to your message describes how to tweak the CSS.
- Is it possible to localize URLs in MediaWiki? I'm talking
specifically about Arabic URLs. As far as I understand, this can only be done on the browser level not MediaWiki, however I'm seeing several refrences to encoding URLs in the code (e.g. $fallback8bitEncoding = "windows-1251"; on messages files).
MediaWiki uses Unicode UTF-8 encoding for all input/output, including URL formatting. The UTF-8 bytes in the URLs are then encoded per spec (that is, as URI-compatible IRIs).
In many cases you can still link to your wiki from outside using a non-Unicode encoding... "incoming" URLs which are detected as not being valid UTF-8 are assumed to be in a language-specific encoding (defined in the language file; for Arabic this will be windows-1256).
Conversion is then applied to get the data into Unicode -- but this will probably only work properly for non-Western encodings when PHP's iconv extension is available.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)