Is this the correct list to ask this question?
Who owns the HTML output for MediaWiki? In other words, who or which group is in charge of the final output of the HTML for all MediaWiki pages? Or does everyone just get to do their own thing?
The reason I ask is because I was recently asked to skin a copy of MediaWiki to put on one of our sites. As I went through the CSS file that came with it and tried to modify it to my needs I found that I could not. The reason I could not is because not all of the CSS was in the CSS file. Not only that but whole sections in the HTML output were not identified and thus had to be modified manually.
Why is this a problem? Everytime a new version of MediaWiki comes out, I am going to be required to tweak the HTML instead of just tweaking the CSS.
Is there an initiative here to standardize the HTML and CSS out put for MediaWiki? To make it easier and cleaner to customize, structure must be separated from content. Markup is only meant to markup, not control structure. Anything to do with style or control should be removed from the HTML and put into the CSS. The result will be cleaner HTML source and more control for designers.
Thank you, Jonathan
We mostly make it up as we go along, if you have suggestions on improving the output, feel free to make them here or at the bugzilla.
Hello Jonathan,
I'm not aware of any systematic effort to move CSS styles out of the HTML output and to add identifiers to all elements. However, I'm sure Novell has the resources to get this done -- I would recommend that you start by submitting some patches through
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
and, if the code is clean, we can give you or other developers from your team CVS access to work on the codebase.
All best,
Erik
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org