On Wed, 1 Jan 2020 at 12:23, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Proposed_specification
That's very serious work, Amir, thank you for investing all the effort!
I'd also love to see this come to fruition. While making a dark-mode theme https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Aron_Manning/Skin_themes#Screenshots for Wikipedia I've noticed the ad-hoc nature of Templates, each using their own hardcoded styling. It is very inefficient to override these styles both in terms of the browser's workload and the developer's effort to collect each case that needs coloring. Actually, it's hardly possible - or it would take forever - to collect all cases; there's always a page left with some unreadable (bright on bright) text. Color inversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Volker_E._(WMF)/dark-mode can handle all cases, but the result is not as pleasant as colors chosen specifically for the purpose. Templates need to use standard styles (similar to those on Wikiversity https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.css/Colors.css) to make product-quality theming possible. With global templates transitioning to the use of standard css classes would be worthwhile.
Another idea: a template editor can be created that parses the long stream of double "{{" and triple "{{{" curly braces and presents the template pretty-printed (reflecting the structure) with different, more readable delimiters like "❮❯", "«»", "‹›" (example https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Aron_Manning/Template_editor#Pretty-printing_templates ). That would make editing a bit easier and less error-prone. I wonder what tools template editors use. Editing this: "<noinclude>{{lorem ipsum}}</noinclude>}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}{{#if:{{{sign|}}}{{{cite|}}}{{{author|}}}" seems humanly impossible.
Aron