On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 7:32 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
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.
A combination of a skin *and* other extension bits could probably be a good future step for simply *adjusting the view a bit* ...
It would have been a extension providing the skin.
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.
I think it *could* do (almost) everything the ruby code did. I agree we should want more of this system than that, though.
I talked with Patrick after the presentation, we will a look at it tomorrow.