On Wed, 1 Jan 2020 at 12:23, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
wrote:
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