On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 8:27 PM, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
I think the next step, after the log comparison test
we both suggested,
would be to set $wgLogo to a protocol-relative URL. A missing logo
wouldn't actually break anything, but you _bet_ people would notice it.
Now that's a simple, elegant, effective idea. It would require almost
no effort, hurt no one, and give immediate feedback. The only catch
with this, as with other image-based proposals, is that a client that
doesn't support images (as well as, in the case of the logo, CSS)
won't be picked up. But I don't see much help for that. There are
few enough of those anyway. lynx does support them, I just checked.
One interesting catch, though, that I just noticed when testing. What
happens when someone downloads the HTML to their hard drive and views
it locally? lynx assumes FTP as the protocol, which is completely
wrong. Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Chrome all try to use the
*file://* protocol -- which is absolutely reasonable but absolutely
terrible for us.
So this means that anyone who tries to save a Wikipedia page using
protocol-relative URLs to their hard drive will find that all the
relevant links are broken. This is, obviously, not a good thing. I
can't see any conceivable workaround, and if there is none I don't see
any way we (or anyone) can use protocol-relative URLs. Being able to
save web pages locally is pretty basic and important functionality
that a lot of people must be relying on.