[Mediawiki-l] Few questions

[Brion Vibber]

Usamah M. Ali wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 1)  Why MediaWiki uses mono fonts on all the <textarea> elements
> related to editing?

It doesn't -- that's the default of your browser. (Unless your browser 
is Safari, in which case it defaults to a Sans Serif font.)

> And would changing that to other font(s) cause
> problems?

It makes ASCII art harder to edit; otherwise, no problems. :)

The other reply to your message describes how to tweak the CSS.

> 2) Is it possible to localize URLs in MediaWiki? I'm talking
> specifically about Arabic URLs. As far as I understand, this can only
> be done on the browser level not MediaWiki, however I'm seeing several
> refrences to encoding URLs in the code (e.g. $fallback8bitEncoding =
> "windows-1251"; on messages files).

MediaWiki uses Unicode UTF-8 encoding for all input/output, including 
URL formatting. The UTF-8 bytes in the URLs are then encoded per spec 
(that is, as URI-compatible IRIs).

In many cases you can still link to your wiki from outside using a 
non-Unicode encoding... "incoming" URLs which are detected as not being 
valid UTF-8 are assumed to be in a language-specific encoding (defined 
in the language file; for Arabic this will be windows-1256).

Conversion is then applied to get the data into Unicode -- but this will 
probably only work properly for non-Western encodings when PHP's iconv 
extension is available.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)