On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:48:04 -0400, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 1:19 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On this point, I think we need:
- Easier management of non-PHP skins (i.e. CSS and images only) *
Automated CSS generation (per original post) * Easier ways to modify the document structure, with less PHP involved. XSLT?
- An interface in PHP that we can live with, so we don't feel obliged to
keep breaking it.
XSLT is a non-starter unless we want fatal errors (or at least the skin completely breaking) on pages where we emit malformed XML. And there always have been some of those, and probably always will be. Probably even more significantly, XSLT is a programming language and a rather obscure one. If we're going to make MediaWiki skins so hard to make, we may as well stick with just requiring that they be in PHP.
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. XSLT works on DOM trees, so malformed XML shouldn't really apply. Of course, the standard command line processors create this tree with a standard parser, usually an XML parser. But in PHP, creating the DOM with a parser and transforming it with XSLT are handled separately.