To summarise my position: # I think the beta of the mobile site is a great place to __review__ the styles we have across Wikipedia and as well as resolving many of the problems of the mobile site it would also result in a much more maintainable Wikipedia.
# I dislike inline styles and don't think they should be supported. I have been taught to always separate layout from HTML to avoid duplication and keep things maintainable. (Helder thanks for the link to the bug [1]). Currently to fix portal page layouts we have to change all these pages >>>[2]. If they were using a class instead it would only take a change in one wiki page (MediaWiki:Common.css). I thus believe we should be paving a path to move away from them.
# "things rely on those inline styles whether we like it or not." No... They rely on styles not //inline// styles. This is my main problem with the current setup! I believe the majority of things done in inline styles that are essential would be better done in MediaWiki:Common.css - if we have text that is red this would be better down with a class markedRed otherwise some text risks being red or and other text #BE3B3B despite meaning the same thing. Most layout problems on mobile can be fixed with media queries. You can't do these in inline styles. ## (The fact MediaWiki:Common.css can only be edited by admins is another concern for me but off topic.)
# I believe people are motivated to fix things when there are agreed deadlines and things they care about are broken rather than vice versa. Out of date layout styles will remain out of date as no-one probably cares about them anymore and it's not a fun or rewarding task to fix them for anyone. On the other hand important problems such as "why is this text not marked red in the mobile site" and working on styling convention documentation for Wikipedia are more motivating to fix in my opinion.
# I believe beta users of the mobile is a very small number of dedicated Wikipedians. The nostyle=true suggestion by MZMcBride would be a great idea but my only worry is with it that no one would use it as users would have to add the query string to every page. This is why I suggested the beta as the problem would be in front of people's faces on every page view and the problems would get surfaced better. FWIW I was thinking more of a javascript implementation - $("[style"]).removeAttr("style") - this way disabling javascript would get people back their styles in a worst case of scenario and it would not effect performance on the server.
# A report bad layout button on each page as suggested by Brion would be highly useful but that's going to take design and coding which I don't believe can be achieved any time soon. Currently users can use the contact us page to report problems but I'm yet to see anyone report bad layout.
I'm not sure what else to say really... I could understand backlash if I was suggesting turning off inline styles on the desktop site or even the mobile site - but all I'm suggesting here is targeting the beta of mobile.
Thanks for everyones contributions so far on this long thread! I really do appreciate this discussion and your patience with me :-).
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15075 [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/List_of_Problematic_portal_pages_with_two_colu...
On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Krinkle krinklemail@gmail.com wrote:
So, stripping inline styles:
- will not fix bad layouts made with tables (which are probably at least as
common as bad layouts made with inline styles).
- will break unrelated things, because inline styles are not directlty
related to layout, they're used for many things.
I think provided that there is the following documentation:
- which layout patterns are problematic (whether with inline styles,
tables or by other means),
- why/how they cause problems
- how to solve that (and how the solution is indeed better for everyone)
... then is is a matter of spreading links to that documentation and waiting for it to be incorporated on the 700+ wikis with the many many portal pages, and other structures that have bad layouts.
I'm generally in agreement with Krinkle on this. But I have to warn that just spreading documentation doesn't magically make things happen -- we probably have to put some actual human effort into finding and fixing broken layouts.
A one-button "report bad layout on this page" thingy might well be nice for that; as could an easy "preview this page for mobile" from the edit page. (Though to be fair, people can switch from desktop to mobile layout with one click -- worth trying out!)
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l