Jon Robson wrote:
More concretely can anyone give me a specific example of an inline style that is essential on mobile that we simply cannot scrub?
We've been over this repeatedly, haven't we? Sometimes there is _data_ in the styling. If you strip out the styling, you'll be throwing away this data. I'm not sure why you're still questioning this or how you've been unable to find specific examples of this. Search the English Wikipedia for phrases such as "marked in green" or "marked in red" or whatever.
Can I at least get some consensus to ***try*** scrubbing inline styles on the beta of the mobile site?
I don't think there's any consensus to implement inline style stripping. However, if you want to write the code and stick it behind a URL parameter (?nostyles=true, e.g.), it'd be interesting to see the results. Abstract the code and if striping inline styles really is everything you dreamed of, you can kill the URL parameter later (or flip the implicit default)? That'd be my approach here.
So crowdsourcing fixes for inline styles doesn't seem to be the most effective method [1]. [1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Making_MediaWiki_Mobile_Friendly/... _of_portal_pages_with_problematic_two_column_layouts&action=history
I was going to suggest that you create reports like this before realizing that you already had. The issue you're having is that these reports are unadvertised and they're on the wrong wiki. I've run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports for a few years. You'd be shocked what kind of stupid shit people like to fix. If you get some automated/semi-automated reports up on the English Wikipedia (so that people can watchlist the pages), explain what the issues are and how to resolve them (link to MediaWiki.org documentation as necessary), advertise the reports, and then wait, you'll find more success. This is a much better approach than creating obscure subpages on mediawiki.org.
As Krinkle says, you need to be patient. The horribly broken pages that keep you awake at night will generally be fixed first in a crowdsourced world. The subtle breakage throughout the site will be fixed over time (or those shitty phones with their shitty browsers will eventually die out in the wild).
MZMcBride