Thread:Talk:New skins system/Incorrect assertions/reply (6)

It's not fixable.

Erudite is just a random WordPress skin duck taped up to work on MediaWiki. The base css itself comes from a WordPress theme which means a few things:
 * The css itself doesn't even follow our coding guidelines. That's fixable but minor.
 * The css is not based on our standard styles. They're not included at all so none of the standard styles you would expect to work on a standard skin are available.
 * The design is css reset based. Usually a reset based design will completely break if you try to remove the reset. It takes a lot of work to fix it. But using a reset on a wiki skin has the potential to break site and user styles in the content.

Besides the css:
 * The markup is problematic for a standard skin. Standard ids expected are not used so you can't target things with the same css. The navigation uses it's complete own classes and ids and discards other attributes we usually output. And you can see how it's not a MW skin. Content actions/tabs are entry-meta. Post and styles are scattered around. The sitename is a "blog-title". The tagline which is aimed at print output but sometimes stylized is a "blog-description" and always visible in an ugly-by-standard way.
 * The design's typography and even overall design and layout is not generic. Fancy serif fonts are used. The first-letter style nor the fancy  fit a generic theme. The placement of search and personal tools are also bad for a standard theme, but fitting of a theme for some random MW based site that likes the theme enough to use it as their default. And the placement of tabs like watch, history, edit, etc... is not fitting for a community edited wiki. The design carelessly uses   's too.

But fundamentally there are two issues:
 * The theme was not designed from the start as a MediaWiki skin. You cannot put MediaWiki content made to work on one of our standard skins and expect it to work as you would expect any standard skin to work. Even if you managed to fix this things fundamental to the design like the restricted page width would interfere with lots of existing wiki content. This is something detrimental to a standard skin but useful to a standalone skin.
 * The theme by necessity is a navigation hack. It uses a horizontal bar instead of a sidebar menu. And to do this it hacks around with the sidebar navigation in a way that discards navigation that users have added and won't even work at all on some wikis. We do not have a standard way to handle horizonatal navigation. So until I rewrite the skin system and eliminate our dependence on MediaWiki:Sidebar for site navigation we can't accept any theme using horizontal navigation as a standard theme.