So crowdsourcing fixes for inline styles doesn't seem to be the most effective method [1]. I've been quite swamped with other work just as I'm sure others have been. As a result various wiki pages are still rendering badly/unreadable. I understand that there are certain circumstances where it is useful to be able to have complete control over styling as a article writer, but I'd also argue that most article writers are not designers so what were are doing in allowing this is introducing a huge variable of complexity that allows anyone to introduce CSS that could potentially be non-performant (transitions), broken or as I am finding stuff that just doesn't work on mobile [2]. This scares me as someone who cares about providing a good experience to all our users on various devices.
I ask you again... //Are inline styles on the __mobile site__ really worth the trade off?//
More concretely can anyone give me a specific example of an inline style that is essential on mobile that we simply cannot scrub?
I would confidently bet that if we were to turn off inline styles on the mobile site we wouldn't miss it much, and I'd much rather deal with things we do miss on a case by case basis, as at least we'd have a clean readable mobile site as a starting point. I also think people are much more motivated to fix things that they previously had and no longer have in comparison to fixing things that are currently broken.
I'm sure all developers would agree that enhancements are always more fun then bugs.. :-)
Can I at least get some consensus to ***try*** scrubbing inline styles on the beta of the mobile site? Note this would have no effect whatsoever on the desktop site and if we are not happy with it we just scrap it. I'm sure if we try it we might find we like it....
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Making_MediaWiki_Mobile_Friendly/... [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Making_MediaWiki_Mobile_Friendly
On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 08.06.2012, 23:25 Derk-Jan wrote:
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.
As much as I would love to have it that way, reality in mobile apps and web apps over the past 3 years have shown me that only works for Android and iOS. Any older feature phones are, in terms of HTML parsing capability, hardly better than the old WAP phones. HTML5 and XHTML 1.0 don't mix very well in the real world.
Well, we already serve either WML or HTML5, no middle ground :)
-- Best regards, Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
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