On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 1:22 AM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
They make MediaWiki emit the HTML half of the picture for the styles they want... ...then many times they implement the CSS other half only on Wikipedia.
Actually that's not how it happens at all. A *large number* of the classes and IDs on various <tags> in the output come because people open bugs requesting them.
A good number are left unstyled by default, because in the default software there isn't a compelling reason to use a particular style (not because we don't care about default MediaWiki, or want to just do it on Wikipedia's "private CSS" or any of the other absurd reasons you've claimed)
However, the classes and IDs are there to give you the *option* of styling it how you want.
-Chad