One of my goals for the year at the Foundation is "Development of a
MediaWiki Style Guide." To that end, I have completed the first draft
of one section, focused on Forms and Form elements.
This project has multiple goals:
* To create consistency across various interfaces
* To help modernize the MediaWiki interface
* To make the overall user experience more enjoyable
* To make writing user interfaces easier for developers
In a perfect world, MediaWiki would have a standardized User Interface
library where a developer can simply say something like
$myInput = UIElements::getTextInput(
type => 'text'
name => 'elementname',
label => 'The Label',
helptext => 'Help text string',
hint => 'Default value',
instructions => 'Instructions string',
errorconditions => array(blah blah blah)
);
And have that do the needful, knowing how to display itself and handle
errors for itself.
We don't live in a perfect world, but we can start to get there.
Here is the first draft. Attack at leisure, and feel free to ignore my
pathetic mewlings as you cut my soul from my bones.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/StyleGuide/Forms
I'm going to expand this further (with things like "tables" and such)
but for now this is a start.
You can comment here or on the talk page.