A few background notes:

* The generic external link icon is applied by virtual of existence of the 'external' class, which is a nice simple implementation. I kinda like it. :)

* In contrast, the CSS rules used to mark certain external links with the PDF, IRC, SSL, etc "specific" icon types are relatively ugly and hard to maintain. These use inefficient client-side attribute value matching. There is a desire to clean these up in the style sheets, which would of course be easiest if they're simply removed.

* If it's useful to keep those subtypes, it may be more desirable to implement them differently (for instance by having the parser apply the matching rules and output a class). This would simplify the CSS rules for maintenance, since they would be able to just use the classes.

* Note that some of the rules such as PDF detection can misidentify resource types (for instance the rules would mark a File:Blah.pdf file *page* on Commons as "PDF" even though it's not actually a PDF download, but an HTML web page). This would not necessarily change under the above proposal to change implementation, as the basic problem is that you can't really reliably determine a file type from a "file extension" on a URL (the only real way to check is to try fetching the resource, or at least its HTTP headers, and report back what type was received).

-- brion

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Quiddity pandiculation@gmail.com wrote:

As Bartosz says, and I think most of the communities would agree if asked on their respective village pumps - we value the external link icon in particular, and most of the other icons in general (with the possible exception of the https padlock). We think they are useful for both editors and readers.

Re: Gadget - This isn't a particular workflow - this is: "I'm reading a random article, and I notice an external link icon, so, as a wikignome, I either: (if spam) remove it, (if citation) fix it, (if [subjective decision about its relevance/worth and adherence to [[WP:EL]] guideline) move it into the External links section." A gadget would not be a good replacement.

By all means clean up the CSS, but do not consider removing the icons without seeking much much wider input.

On 13-10-29 11:57 AM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:

...

Nick, good points, for the particular use case sounds like a gadget for showing external links called out for workflows around fixing them would be a good idea. After hearing everyone's thought i'm leaning toward no icons for the average user.

*Jared Zimmerman *\Director of User Experience \Wikimedia Foundation M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman <https://twitter.com/** JaredZimmerman https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:41 AM, quiddity <pandiculation@gmail.com <mailto:pandiculation@gmail.**com pandiculation@gmail.com>> wrote:

+1 for more discussion, and onwiki discussion to find out why
we/they've each kept them in the individual CSS payloads for so many
years...


                On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:

...

                Its  definitely a less heavy handed way of doing
                the thing many (annoying) sites do when they warn
                you that you're leaving their site. I just wonder
                is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know
                that modern web users have any expectations that
                link within a site always point to local site urls.

Wikis are special, in relation to most sites, because of the density
of internal links (many per paragraph), and the expectation that
most links are internal and will lead to a similar quality/style of
information. That applies from Wikisource, to Wookiepedia.

In wikis that don't mix external links in the main content (eg most
Wikipedias), the icons are also useful /for editors/ as they can

easily notice that something needs to be moved/fixed.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Help:External_link_icons<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:External_link_icons>for a
good list of what the English Wikipedia has.

See also recent discussion at
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.**org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604>("Ridiculous
amount of CSS rules for external links")


The only icon that seems (afaik) completely unnecessary, and
bright/distracting, is the https padlock, which possibly
could/should be replaced with the standard external link icon.
(Unless there's a rationale for it that I'm forgetting/unaware of.)

See this 2009 discussion where Davidgothberg created a blue (less
distracting) replacement, if we need to keep a padlock for some

reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**MediaWiki_talk:Common.css/** Archive_11#Secure_links_**padlockhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Common.css/Archive_11#Secure_links_padlock https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/**60320https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/60320

HTH. Quiddity

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