I've been playing around with skins a lot recently. The MobileFrontend extension has had to do various transformations to the content pre-rendering to ensure certain things do not get rendered on mobile (for example table of contents) as well as allow us to do collapsible sections.
When rendering content skins are currently limited to rendering the 'bodytext' key. They cannot retrieve the underlying content. I would like to remove restrictions to skin designers - for instance currently a skin designer has no control over where the table of contents should do. They could not easily put it in a side bar for instance.
I was experimenting with using the onOutputPageParserOutput hook [1] (running based on the current skin) and think it might be a better approach to run the transformations on smaller chunks of data. For instance the table of contents is known to be in the lead section so it seems like it would be more efficient to look for it there rather than throughout the entire document. The solution is not complete but provides an approach that I think would be more efficient on the long term.
It seems like a good idea to experiment with this approach in MobileFrontend extension with the goal to upstream it to core.
Would appreciate comments from people who know this area of code rather well - Max comes to mind :)
Thoughts welcomed!