On 05.06.2012, 16:16 Jon wrote:
I still think inline styles are going to continue causing problems on the mobile site as many people creating articles may only me thinking in terms of how a page will look in desktop rather than mobile. Although I personally would turn them off on the mobile website I seem to be in a minority.
I spoke to several people including Gabriel Wicke and Brion Vibber on this subject at the Berlin hackathon and I think possibly the best way we as a community can address this is to identify the problems on a case by case basis.
To do this I've created a page [1] the idea being that community members can report/identify situations where inline styles don't work on the mobile site, document them and provide a suggested resolution. These situations can then be linked to a list of effected pages that require cleaning up, for example [2]. These lists can be generated using Gabriel's dumpGrepper.js [3]. For the time being I've just run a grep on English Wikipedia but depending on whether this is successful I'll branch out to other languages
Hopefully this will result in some sort of reference page for how to write styles that work well on both mobile and desktop.
I think we should strive to leave HTML transformation behind - for non-WAP devices we could rely on CSS only. DOM parsing made a lot of sense at the time of the Ruby gateway which had to parse HTML for screen-scraping anyway. However, now by avoiding HTML parsing we could:
* Avoid performance reduction for mobile requests * Make out output more uniform * Stop relying on that unsalvageable piece of crap called libxml
For specific cases when there's a lot of desktop HTML that doesn't need to be shown to mobile users at all, we could tweak the parser to ouptut mobile-specific HTML, but this should be restricted to minimum.