Talk:Separating skins from core MediaWiki

I am agnostic to whether all skins should be moved out of core (and to whether MediaWiki should ship with a default skin), but I think the fact that skins live in core leads to bad practices. Going through the process of moving CologneBlue and Modern out of core I am shocked about how much rebasing I have had to do. The fact that we are making changes to CologneBlue and Modern in 2014 [1] seems broken - our skins should be much more resilient to change and it should be possible to leave a skin untouched without it breaking.

You claim that you will not be "rewriting the Skin and SkinTemplate classes." although I really think you should be more ambitious and should revisit this idea. I think you have a good chance here at making our skin infrastructure less a mess. Ideally a skin should just be given a bunch of data e.g. the history url, the talk page url, the sections, the section edit link urls, the text of the page, the page title that it can create HTML markup for and apply a skin to e.g. take a lot of logic out of the skin itself. If we can get to a goal where skin designers only have to think in terms of HTML and CSS I think this is a wonderful place to be.

Also I wonder if somehow your work here could fold nicely into this other proposal - User:Jack_Phoenix/A_modern,_scalable_and_attractive_skin_for_MediaWiki_(GSoC_2014_proposal) - maybe Jack's new skin could be built and aid the decisions of the new skin infrastructure built out by you?

I'd be interested in mentoring this, if what I am saying above is of interest and inline with where you think we should take the skin system. Also note, by the start of this project there will be only 2 skins in core - Monobook and Vector. I'd suggest you limit yourself to refactoring these, whilst maintaining backwards compatibility for the older skins. Jdlrobson (talk) 18:47, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

[1] I999b97729536dbab4a3a5efd8d6f86527f031948