The answer is not as simple as that. First let's try to explain the structure a bit. All existing skins are a combination of a PHP template and a set of CSS. When we say Vector, we mean the PHP UI template vector, and the CSS that goes with that template. This template itself only handles everything outside the 'content', which is usually the sidebar, topbar, footer, the 'mostly static' areas of every single viewed page. The Vector CSS targets these elements as well, but in addition also targets elements of the content (some of which it shares with other skins).
As you might note, it already sounds chaotic. The currently shipped by default CSS skins (and especially the MobileFrontend one) are as responsive as is useful, considering the constraints of the user base, our not too consistent classnames and IDs and the totally 'unstructured' content that is created by MediaWiki or that is the output of the wikitext of a page. There are also a lot of constraints on these classnames and identifiers, because they are widely used inside scripts of 100s of modules and extensions etc and used and defined all over the place internally wherever 'content' is generated. And then there are things like rtl and mixed rtl and ltr environments, accessibility etc to consider, which most sites happily ignore :) These constraints are what makes the authoring of a skin a complex task in MediaWiki-land, especially if you want to target existing audiences. Writing a bunch of CSS and PHP is easy, making it work across everything that is currently already in use without pissing of existing customers is what is hard. Improving the structure, the responsiveness and removing the technical and historical debt are things we work on all the time, but by the nature of our Wiki landscape it will be a very slow process, still requiring some 4 more years to get to where we need to be (just my guess). To get closer to the answer you were probably looking for: there are no existing layout classes in use by mediawiki, other than the very new and not yet widely deployed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OOjs_UI layouts, If you make a new PHP skin, you can add such classes of course (or u add them by way of JS), but u will break some pages and fixing this 'long tail' is where your biggest challenges would likely be (and the separately shipped and maintained responsive MW skins Chameleon and Foreground, might feel non-responsive due to similar long tails). Experiments in this area are very welcome, and will feed into the improvements we make. Use the skin wherever u want, but don't get your hopes up for a deployment to a WMF wiki, because that is unlikely. Hope that answers your questions. DJ On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Jonathan Aquilina <eagles051...@gmail.com> wrote: > Im not trying to avoid it if its necessary for media wiki. but native skins > for MW are they responsive or are 3rd party skins necessary? > > On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński <matma....@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > On Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:58:48 +0100, Jonathan Aquilina < > > eagles051...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Would anyone be able to answer the above on this list? Would I still > need > >> to touch php for the layouts? or can that be bypassed and pure html and > >> css > >> used instead? Obviously injecting php as needed? > >> > > > > I am not sure what you mean. You can't avoid writing PHP entirely when > > creating a skin (it's not a real "templating" language), but you don't > need > > to write a lot of it and you can copy-paste samples. > > > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning is helpful. > > > > > > -- > > Bartosz Dziewoński > > > > _______________________________________________ > > MediaWiki-l mailing list > > To unsubscribe, go to: > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > > > > > > -- > Jonathan Aquilina > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > To unsubscribe, go to: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
