Parsoid/Parser Unification/Cite CSS

Like all extensions, the Cite extension has localized messages. However, a significant portion of the localized messages are for formatting and for localizing the numbering scheme.

Parsoid takes a different approach than the legacy parser and uses CSS to do the number-format-specific localization of the Cite extension. One of the reasons for this approach is to ensure a good editing experience in editing clients like VisualEditor. When citations are modified (added / removed), using CSS ensures that the numbers adjust automatically and consistently. Otherwise, VE (and other clients) would have to make a server request to re-render all citations each time one is added or removed which can make for a poor and inefficient experience.

Wikis should add appropriate CSS rules to their  file to ensure proper localization of citations in Visual Editor, given this difference in how citation number localization is done. This will become even more important as we start to migrate toward the use of Parsoid HTML for readers, not just for editing.

Which wikis are impacted?
Pretty much any wiki that uses localized numbering schemes will be impacted.

There are three sources for localization:


 * 1) Language-specific counters in MediaWiki core
 * 2) Language-specific localization messages in the Cite extension repository
 * 3) Message overrides defined in the   namespace on the wiki.

Any wiki that uses localized numbers on wiki might be impacted. Additionally, any wiki using a language that provides a localized message for one of these Cite extension messages may need CSS rules for Parsoid HTML Example: For language  and message    in order to determine if your language is affected, you should check to see if   has non-default content; this should include both wiki-specific overrides as well as any defaults set in   in the   extension repository.
 * cite_reference_link
 * cite_references_link_many_format
 * cite_references_link_many_format_backlink_labels
 * cite_references_link_one
 * cite_references_link_many
 * cite_references_link_many_sep
 * cite_references_link_many_and
 * messages with "Cite_link_label_group-" prefix.

Localized language counters in MediaWiki core
The Content Transform Team has addressed this via T156350 and these rules will be available for all these language wikis on all projects. We have defined language-specific counters that had localized counters defined in MediaWki and deployed them (Ex: arabic, bengali).

Localized Cite messages on a wiki
Some wikis further localize citation formatting by using message overrides in the  namespace on that wiki.

Here is the list of 157 wikis that have some site message defined for Cite.

Is there a way to see if my wiki is impacted?
Yes. If you open a page that has citations in VisualEditor, and the citations on the page render differently from outside VE, then your wiki either needs language-specific CSS rules (which we have handled via T156350 as above), or it needs CSS rules to be added to  which you will need to add. You can check whether your wiki has site-specific overrides in the  namespace to determine if you need to add CSS rules in.

Is there any help with writing these CSS rules?
Yes, we have some useful resources for you to write up these rules.

You can use these as starting points to update your wiki's. Depending on how your wiki's CSS is structured, you may not necessarily want to copy-paste these exact rules into your wiki, but those rules will hopefully make it quicker to update your wiki's CSS.

Programmatically generated CSS rules
We wrote a script to process all the localization messages (on wiki and in the Cite extension) and generated CSS rules for your wiki.

As part of visual diff testing, we have had to add a number of these CSS rules to the testing repo. These include the script-generated CSS for wikis and add corrections / tweaks where the script couldn't get the CSS right to the last detail. You can see these rules here. For most wikis, these rules should work out of the box.

How can we verify changes?
As above, you can open the page in VisualEditor (after ensuring caches are purged) to see if your CSS fixes have improved the rendering of citations.

Reporting bugs
You can report bugs on Phabricator - please use the Parsoid or Parsoid-Read-Views tag to report your bugs.

Asking for help
You can reach out to the Content Transform Team by posting via the Talk page for this page. You may also be able to find us on IRC, but the talk page is probably the best place since the responses there might also help others.