Requests for comment/Deprecating inline styles

Currently the language MediaWiki uses to author documents allows the inclusion of html elements with style attributes. Mixing layout with content causes various problems with reusability, maintainability and is not future proof. Already on the mobile version of MediaWiki problems are being seen with inline styles with how pages render on smaller screens which could be solved via css3 media queries, however these cannot be done in inline styles. In addition to this the majority of things done in inline styles would be better done as class names for the purpose of consistency. For instance if we have text that is red (where 'red' is being used to serve a warning) this would be better down with a class warning otherwise some text risks being red whilst other text trying to express the same meaning may be a different tone of red (e.g. #BE3B3B)

To take a real example, various pages use inline styles to create two column layouts. Currently to fix portal page layouts we have every page that uses them. A preferred approach would be to make use of stylesheets and classes. This would mean that it would only take a change in one wiki page. Additional css rules could also be made to target more specific cases such as print and mobile layouts.