I suggested an "universal" skin once, as a HTML page with pseudo-variables (e.g., "$articlebody$" or "<articletitle>") and conditions (e.g., "<loggedin>...</loggedin>") to be replaced with the values from LocalSettings and Language files. Never got around implementing it, though.
Iwas more thinking of a fast template style thing. no language files, instead.. language themes, language files work, but its not that great, plus they add potential for formatting errors because of lengths of words and phrases.. however i do like the tags thing... bml-ish almost
Oh and also.. anyone ever consider adding a spellcheck feature? Because I have been thinking about it, but I'd like to know if this has been an idea shot down before for a reason, you know, so I dont waste my time [attempting] implementing it.
There was talk about this, but never any concrete plans. Implementation could be tricky. Maybe that would be something to implement in an "offline wikipedia editor"? There was brief talk about such a thing as
well.
I dont like the sound of "offline" editor. but with the built-in pspell functionality in PHP spellchecking would'nt be hard to implement, i think the easiest way would be to add a third button at the bottom of the "edit article" page that say's "Preview with spellcheck" since spellchecking is a resource hog, and shouldnt really be run when not needed. I think the best way to implement this would be to highlight each misspelled word using css, and adding a small superscript number to the right of the word linking to an anchor at the bottom of the page, which says,
Words: that may be misspelled:
1.) ofline ---suggestions: offline 2.).....
get me? of course if the software ran with templates this would be a matter of a couple lines of code anda new theme, but as thesoftware stands it could pose a bit of a problem and WOULD crowd the article page... of course i could just move all that to a separate page.. that'd be no biggie.
I just really think that all classes should be in separate files and included into the pages, it would make for much, much cleaner code.. you know separating code from HTML... this would also allow for easy creation of front ends.. an XML front end, an RSS, front end, XHTML., older more old-browser-compatible HTML, text only, bigger fonts for people with bad eyesight... its a whole accesibility feature.
Lightning