https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46956
Web browser: ---
Bug ID: 46956
Summary: HTML versioning information needed in skins to be able
to cleanly make incompatible CSS changes
Product: MediaWiki
Version: 1.22-git
Hardware: All
OS: All
Status: NEW
Severity: normal
Priority: Unprioritized
Component: Skin and page rendering
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Blocks: 27292, 46947
Classification: Unclassified
Mobile Platform: ---
In the Wikimedia setup generated page HTML is cached for ~30 days regardless of
skin HTML changes, while CSS&JS is purged at most a few minutes after a change
is deployed.
This is a highly suboptimal situation, as this means that in every change that
modifies both the HTML and the CSS, the CSS must be backwards-compatible with
old HTML. This requires a lot of care and additional awkward testing and causes
major issues when not done carefully enough (e.g. bug 42452), and sometimes
just isn't possible at all unless some transitional hacks are inserted (e.g.
bug 46947).
Luckily this isn't an issue for most third-party wikis, as `php update.php`
after upgrade purges the cache entirely.
----
I'm proposing adding another class to <body>, "skintimestamp-YYYYMMDD", where
YYYYMMDD is the year, month and day of the time that given skin's HTML was last
modified in an incompatible way. Day should be enough granularity to avoid
conflicts while keeping the class name short enough.
This can be easily done using the addToBodyAttributes() method of the Skin
class. The timestamp would be updated manually by whoever is making those
changes, and the class could be used in the CSS to only apply new styles to
newly generated HTML. Older styles could be simply left intact, and then
removed after enough time has passed.
If multiple incompatible changes are ever done in overlapping time periods, the
successive ones would include updates to the "old new" styles to use both the
new and old class.
Thoughts?
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