On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:30 PM, Trevor Parscal <tpars...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Why only Monobook and Vector? 94%[1] of users on English Wikipedia are > currently using one of them.
That means 6% aren't, i.e., ~700,000 users. That's actually much higher than I expected. It would be particularly silly to throw out Chick, Simple, and MySkin, since those differ from Monobook only in CSS. I don't think we should get rid of any skins here if feasible. > In short, It's better to give users their choice of 3 decent skins than > 10 crappy ones, and if we can make migration to the new system less > painful, it's more likely to actually happen. The skins would only be more "decent" from a developer's perspective, not a user's perspective. I'm reluctant to agree that we should get rid of skins that people actually use in significant numbers (even 0.1% of 10,000,000+ is significant) when it will yield no substantial user-visible improvements. If the new system only includes Vector/Monobook/Modern at first, fine, but keep the old skins too -- at least we'll have only two skin systems instead of four. When someone feels motivated, they can port the old skins to the new system in some format. (It's okay IMO if they're not exactly the same, as long as they look similar enough.) On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Trevor Parscal <tpars...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Merging Monobook and Modern is actually a good point for one of my other > ideas, which is to have themes for skins. In other words, same HTML > generation, different CSS. Then Monobook and Modern could naturally be > merged, Vector could have a different colored version, etc. I'd still be interested in seeing some differences between Vector and Monobook HTML that are necessary at all. There are a *lot* of small, seemingly gratuitous differences that could be wiped out, like: * No <div id="globalWrapper"> or <div id="column-content"> * Two empty <div class="noprint"> at the top, also <div id="mw-js-message"> * Lots of extra comments like <!-- sitenotice --> <!-- /sitenotice --> * <div id="head"> instead of <div id="column-one">, and it has class="noprint" and so on. These all make things harder to do and will force code duplication. Every id or element that exists in one skin but not another means it's that much harder to write portable scripts and styles. If we want more comments, or extra empty divs for JS to hook into (why not create those with JS like we do with jsMsg in wikibits.js?), then add them to *all* skins. And if Vector doesn't need globalWrapper or column-content, it can have them anyway but just not style them -- that doesn't hurt anything. (These concerns all apply to Modern as well, which I also complained about when it was introduced.) I'm also concerned by the fact that at least some (I haven't looked closely) of the Usability Initiative stuff seems to work only in Vector. For instance, apparently EditWarning doesn't work at all in non-Vector skins, although it's surely just as applicable. Skins should *only* be used to provide different visual appearance -- they should not be creating functional differences. Users should be able to choose which skin they prefer based on aesthetics alone, without having to sacrifice features to use their preferred skin. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
