Yeah, the local CSS/JS cruft is definitely a problem. I've tried doing clean-up on a few wikis, but I usually just get chewed out by the local admins for not discussing every change in detail (which obviously doesn't scale for fixing 200+ wikis). I would love to hear ideas for how to address this problem.
Ryan Kaldari
On 3/30/11 4:57 AM, Marcin Cieslak wrote:
Aryeh GregorSimetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote: The fact that you don't see the difference in the two screenshots is not reassuring. In one, the search icon is clearly misplaced as it is overlapping the border of the search input, in the other it is not. This is caused solely by the DOCTYPE difference.
Now I see it, yes. They're cropped very differently, so I didn't spot the difference when flipping back and forth. I was looking at the boxes' edges, and didn't notice the difference in the position of the magnifying glass. Anyway, this is exactly the sort of minor bug where it's not worth it to worry too much about whether it breaks for a while -- certainly not to the extent of having to budget for the change, nor to the extent of reverting a change that's been in place for so long. To the extent of reviewing before deployment, sure, maybe. Doesn't bother me if we deploy without reviewing for this kind of thing, but I can see why you'd prefer to be more careful.
Sorry for bringing this up, I was the one who cropped those screenshots that way. Those screetshots are best viewed within the context of:
http://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/...
By the way, I am not happy with the "reverted" version either, the search icon is a bit too high and the box is overlapping the line. In general, this CSS is probably too fragile and to prone to font/platform/resolution/zoom factor/whatever problems.
I really hope that getting proper CSS for HTML5 in *core* is just a matter of checking few workarounds in Vector and maybe Monobook and that's it.
However, for successful Wikimedia deployment, there is a different problem:
For years already I was fighting a happy-go-lucky approach to styling in MediaWiki:Common.css/Monobook.css as well as in individual templates. (My battleground is Polish Wikipedia). There are dozens of quick fixes and workarounds there also for various browsers issues. It is indeed the problem they haven't been sometimes properly communicated back upstream.
Actually I was wondering - and we need to discuss this with plwiki's tech community - to literally throw out all of MediaWiki:Common.js/Common.css code and "see what breaks" once Wikimedia moves to HTML5. Maybe this could be a sort of heads-up message given out to the community once we are ready to switch over to HTML5?
We have a huge backlog in converting our JavaScript already (ResourceLoader for one, removing all the library code we should get rid of once we have jQuery). Only most rudimentary fixes to sitewide js has been done so far and maybe some gadgets.
While I deeply believe we can quickly sort out all the issues with the MediaWiki codebase. The real problem is with the global css/js cruft, that major Wikipedias accumulated over years. I am afraid that's something that WMF developers cannot really handle, since they didn't put this in there in the first place, but maybe this is the problem with just few major wikis only?
Maybe there aresome things that would help, like unning copies of major wikis on prototype (including the content!) or something like that. Any suggestions?
//Marcin
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