This is a question about an infrastructural detail of ResourceLoader and how it interacts
with Internet Explorer. (It's my first post to wikitech-l, so apologies if it's
the wrong forum.)
Our MediaWiki 1.17.0 site recently installed a bunch of extensions that use
ResourceLoader, such as Extension:WikiEditor. To our surprise, some of our site's
unrelated CSS styles stopped working. This was happening only in Internet Explorer. After
some detective work, we discovered the problem is Internet Explorer's limit of 31
stylesheets:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262161
With so many extensions calling $wgOut->addModule [PHP} and mw.loader.load
[JavaScript], the limit of 31 stylesheets is exceeded quickly. I removed a few
mw.loader.load calls - it didn't matter which ones - and the problem went away.
Obviously this is an IE problem, not MediaWiki's, but it's going to cause issues
on MediaWiki sites. WikiEditor itself loads about 10 stylesheets, for example, taking the
site ~30% of the way toward a CSS failure.
So my questions are:
1. Is there a workaround for sites like mine, with many stylesheets from separate
extensions loaded by ResourceLoader?
2. Should ResourceLoader address this IE problem? Maybe start combining stylesheets (with
@import) automatically?
Thanks,
DanB