Mailing List Archive

Lightning wrote:

>Hi, I am Lightning.. Thats also my username in wikipedia.
>
Hi, and welcome!

> Seems like there's
>this whole big hoop-la about i8n, and translation and yadda yadda yadda. I
>was kind of thinking, since some languages dont translate so easily, (as to
>say you cant just change that string and it will look right), are templates
>a possibility? I was looking through the code, and it looks pretty straight
>forward, but all the HTML in the code is just kinda, nasty and crowds the
>code.. I think a separation of the code and markup would be a really good
>thing. new themes would be easy to make, and it would allow for a lot more
>formatting options and easier changing of the look and feel of the page.
>Anyone have any opinions? has this been brought up before?
>
I suggested an "universal" skin once, as a HTML page with
pseudo-variables (e.g., "$articlebody$" or "<articletitle>") and
conditions (e.g., "<loggedin>...</loggedin>") to be replaced with the
values from LocalSettings and Language files. Never got around
implementing it, though.

>Oh and also.. anyone ever consider adding a spellcheck feature? Because I
>have been thinking about it, but I'd like to know if this has been an idea
>shot down before for a reason, you know, so I dont waste my time
>[attempting] implementing it.
>
There was talk about this, but never any concrete plans. Implementation
could be tricky. Maybe that would be something to implement in an
"offline wikipedia editor"? There was brief talk about such a thing as well.

Magnus

>I suggested an "universal" skin once, as a HTML page with
>pseudo-variables (e.g., "$articlebody$" or "<articletitle>") and
>conditions (e.g., "<loggedin>...</loggedin>") to be replaced with the
>values from LocalSettings and Language files. Never got around
>implementing it, though.

Iwas more thinking of a fast template style thing. no language files,
instead.. language themes, language files work, but its not that great, plus
they add potential for formatting errors because of lengths of words and
phrases.. however i do like the tags thing... bml-ish almost

>>Oh and also.. anyone ever consider adding a spellcheck feature? Because I
>>have been thinking about it, but I'd like to know if this has been an idea
>>shot down before for a reason, you know, so I dont waste my time
>>[attempting] implementing it.
>>
>There was talk about this, but never any concrete plans. Implementation
>could be tricky. Maybe that would be something to implement in an
>"offline wikipedia editor"? There was brief talk about such a thing as
well.

I dont like the sound of "offline" editor. but with the built-in pspell
functionality in PHP spellchecking would'nt be hard to implement, i think
the easiest way would be to add a third button at the bottom of the "edit
article" page that say's "Preview with spellcheck" since spellchecking is a
resource hog, and shouldnt really be run when not needed. I think the best
way to implement this would be to highlight each misspelled word using css,
and adding a small superscript number to the right of the word linking to an
anchor at the bottom of the page, which says,

Words: that may be misspelled:

1.) ofline
---suggestions: offline
2.).....

get me? of course if the software ran with templates this would be a matter
of a couple lines of code anda new theme, but as thesoftware stands it could
pose a bit of a problem and WOULD crowd the article page... of course i
could just move all that to a separate page.. that'd be no biggie.

I just really think that all classes should be in separate files and
included into the pages, it would make for much, much cleaner code.. you
know separating code from HTML... this would also allow for easy creation of
front ends.. an XML front end, an RSS, front end, XHTML., older more
old-browser-compatible HTML, text only, bigger fonts for people with bad
eyesight... its a whole accesibility feature.

Lightning