At the moment, only PHP coders can re-design skins. This is bad, since
good coding skills and good design skills are not strongly correlated.
With all the effort being devoted to tweaking the current layout, and
arguing about it, we could instead be doing two things:
* decoupling code from content by using text-only template files instead
of PHP code to control the final assembly of page content
* decoupling content from graphical presentation by using CSS more
thoroughly
This then turns making new skins into something that can be done by
regular logged-in users with only graphic design / Web skills, without
any security or performance implications. By allowing them to edit their
own template and CSS files _on the Wiki itself_, we can enable them to
show off their skin designs to other users. We can then hold a beauty
contest without elaborate votes... by doing, rather than by talking.
This would also make designing a new layout much more interesting as a
general design competition for graphic designers.
The fly in the ointment is backwards compatibility to ancient and
brain-dead browsers such as IE 3.0 and Netscape 4.7. What we need for
these is a special backwards-compatibility skin, just for these, and
some server-side browser sniffing to deliver this skin instead of the
normal default skin for these broken browsers. There are only a finite
number of broken browsers, and anything else can be reasonably expected
to be either a text-only browser or a reasonably working new post-CSS
browser, and served with the default skin if there is no other preference.
Neil