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

Contrary to the goals of GSoC
I oppose this project, for the same reason I opposed Jack's potential skinning project. Here, too, the project seems contrary to the stated goals of the Google Summer of Code, which include allowing projects "to more easily identify and bring in new developers". Although this case is not as extreme - Jack was actually a GSoC mentor - it still involves a student who's already a MediaWiki developer, and thus this project would take an opportunity away from someone who would be a new open source contributor. As with the other skinning project, I would argue for the WMF to fund it directly, if this change is considered useful. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:59, 23 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Necessary follow-up: as someone noted on the other talk page, Google themselves say it's fine, as long as the relationship is acknowledged. So I take back what I wrote, especially because Matma Rex only became a MediaWiki developer recently. Yaron Koren (talk) 16:26, 23 March 2014 (UTC)