At the moment, only PHP coders can re-design skins. This is bad, since good coding skills and good design skills are not strongly correlated. With all the effort being devoted to tweaking the current layout, and arguing about it, we could instead be doing two things: * decoupling code from content by using text-only template files instead of PHP code to control the final assembly of page content * decoupling content from graphical presentation by using CSS more thoroughly
This then turns making new skins into something that can be done by regular logged-in users with only graphic design / Web skills, without any security or performance implications. By allowing them to edit their own template and CSS files _on the Wiki itself_, we can enable them to show off their skin designs to other users. We can then hold a beauty contest without elaborate votes... by doing, rather than by talking. This would also make designing a new layout much more interesting as a general design competition for graphic designers.
The fly in the ointment is backwards compatibility to ancient and brain-dead browsers such as IE 3.0 and Netscape 4.7. What we need for these is a special backwards-compatibility skin, just for these, and some server-side browser sniffing to deliver this skin instead of the normal default skin for these broken browsers. There are only a finite number of broken browsers, and anything else can be reasonably expected to be either a text-only browser or a reasonably working new post-CSS browser, and served with the default skin if there is no other preference.
Neil