[Mediawiki-l] automatic addition of css class names to template based html structures such as tables

[Mathias Schindler]

Hi,

I recently came across a very beautiful piece of software called
"Prince" (www.princexml.com). It is closed source and does transfer
html and other files to pdf - in an imho very beautiful fashion*. Some
samples can be found at http://princexml.com/samples/, including pdf
files generated from Wikipedia text. There is a free (as in beer)
evaulation copy of the software avialable for download, so you can try
out the sites yourself. With the help of the special css file
(http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2008/wikipedia/wiki2.css) written by
Håkon Wium Lie.

Håkon has written a text  about this topic at
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/, in which he
mentions some of the problems in the transformation effort. At the
bottom, there are currently three recommendations.

Before I open a feature request at bugzilla about this, I would like
to ask you about the feasibility of a tool that - in case no manual
class name is assigned -, template generated tables are given classes
and other information to the html text to help identify it, possibly
based on the name of the template or the parameter invoked in it.

Mathias

* there are multiple ways to do so, including the open source
pediapress project.