Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Scoping site CSS

nv.wiki is given as an example of a negative customization. This is a bit sad, because it is actually one of the nicest examples of customization. Not just because it is beautiful - that's a matter of taste - but because it shows a real need that some communities have: To customize their wiki to show something of their culture and to make it more comfortable, but without making a whole new skin. Because you know what happens when a new skin is made, right? - The developers, quite rightly, don't want to support it, and bam: VisualEditor doesn't work.

Arabic had a comparable cultural customization in the past, but the introduction of Vector broke it.

A clever separation of styles that takes into account the communities' needs for cultural customization without getting in the way of introducing new technologies is the way to go.

It was I that brought up nv wiki. I agree it's a great example of customisation and self expression however my main concerns lie around interface elements for users that flick between languages. Selected tabs change colours and the menus look different - user interfaces can be hard to learn and if things look somewhat different within the same problem this creates huge user experience problems.

I agree that people should be able to customise skins more easily but MediaWiki:Common.css is a terribly bad way of doing it. It leads to rules like this

#foo bar a {
  color: blue;
}
#foo bar a {
  color: #ccc;
}

where the first rule is overwritten in the css cascade. Ideally there should just be one rule:

#foo bar a {
  color: #ccc;
}

That's an argument against using global (Wikimedia-wide) css, not against local MW:Common.css.