On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Patrick Reilly preilly@wikimedia.orgwrote:
The reason that I went the route of creating an extension vs a skin was that I wanted the most flexibility in adapting the content for mobile device rendering. There are a number of sections that need to be removed from the final output in order to render the content effectively on mobile devices. So, being able to use a PHP output buffer handling is a nice feature. I also wanted the ability to use many of the features that are available when writing an extension to hook into core functionality.
To clarify -- a skin alone can't really do everything we want out of this system -- it needs to be able to freely modify a large swath of output, including rewriting content and styles and breaking long pages into shorter pages.
A combination of a skin *and* other extension bits could probably be a good future step for simply *adjusting the view a bit* for high-functioning modern smartphones on the regular site, but will need to be combined with paying more attention to how our MediaWiki's native user interface elements display on a very small screen at native mobile size (as opposed to a zoomable desktop-sized rendering as when you view regular MediaWiki on an iPhone or Android browser).
The 'extension that rewrites a bunch o' stuff on output' allows a more direct port of the existing Ruby codebase, which'll get equivalent stuff running and ready to hack sooner. IMO this is a plus!
We *should* continue to look at the core MediaWiki interface as well, and longer term also end up thinking about ways to supplement some forms & special pages with small-screen-friendly variants. (Editing for instance will.... not be very nice with a toolbar that's three times wider than your screen, and will need a major redesign! :D)
-- brion