Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Responsive CSS/Template Framework for Media Wiki

Responsive CSS/Template Framework for Media Wiki

  • Problem:

Most of the help and meta pages are in Wikipedia and other WikiProjects are cobbled with strange copy'n'paste constructions of Templates, HTML and InlineStyles. This leads to an inconsistent, hard to maintain interface, that fails on many platforms. A lot of the editors maintaining these pages are not programmers. Since there is no simple comprehensible library where they can find all the buttons, boxes, grids and teasers. Most of them copy just what they find on other meta-pages - often without really understanding how it works.

  • Who would benefit:

Readers and Editors alike

  • Proposed solution:
    Create a simple but effective library of CSS-Styles (like Bootstrap) and MediaWiki-Templates, that enables editors to quickly create interfaces that work on all devices and screen sizes and has a consistent look and feel. Possible components are:
    • Buttons
    • Teaser-Boxes
    • Form-Elements
    • A Grid-System
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion

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If I understand correctly, this would be like T90687, except scoped for the content area, not the software/skin area. That would be a great thing to have, although potentially a lot of work (it would have to take into account different devices, different skins, RTL...) Developers would probably benefit just as much editors/readers as it would be easier to make assumptions about how articles look / wrangle the content to be appropriate for mobile screens.

@Martin Kraft:: The proposal could do with a less handwavy list of use cases IMO (forms and buttons are barely used in wikitext-generated content, and I imagine a grid and boxes would not be the only things to standardize; see also the various subtasks and blockers of T483).

For performance reasons this might depend on TemplateStyles (although if it's not too much overhead we might just prefer to load such a framework on all pages; especially if the original, software-interface-oriented version of T90687 does get done and uses the same rules). --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 02:09, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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