https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71621

--- Comment #7 from Kunal Mehta (Legoktm) <[email protected]> ---
(In reply to Krinkle from comment #5)
> This would result in loading only part of a module, which is in my opinion
> against expectations.

We already serve only the CSS of the module to no-JS users, so it's not totally
against expectations.

> 
> I don't like escalating a relatively simple bug into a social problem, but I
> think this is one of those cases where that is appropriate.
> 
> Maybe we should discourage people from theming their wiki to this extreme
> via this method? Third parties should add a stylesheet via LocalSettings
> instead of Common.css.
> 
> This should be done by a developer instead (especially for third parties).

Part of the problem is that AFAIK there is no good/easy way to do that outside
of a) writing your own skin (overkill in most cases), b) directly editing the
skin stylesheets, which we really don't want people to do.

> 
> For Wikimedia sites, I'd like to think that, while it's kind of
> undocumented, that people really should not significantly change the site
> interface. Users should not be able to notice a difference outside the
> content area when the styles are not loaded.
> 
> That thing about people thinking it's a different site, that goes both ways.
> When they visit that different language edition, should that be allowed to
> look like a completely different website?
> 
> Main reason being that the software interface is provided by MediaWiki core.
> If there are problems there, they should be reported to the software and
> addressed accordingly. Things can be iterated and tried in gadgets, but for
> something so central to the software, it either shouldn't be done (e.g. bad
> idea), or should be done (good idea) and done in the software itself so that
> it may benefit a wider audience (and usually a higher quality result in
> terms of browser support, user experience, performance and maintainability).
> 
> Something as fundamental as the site font, for example. That's either a
> personal preference one could question whether it's responsible for users to
> override, or there's a technical reason (eg. their wiki's language doesn't
> render well in the font we choose by default) - in which case we shouldn't
> put that burden on them. By all means that is a high priority problem for
> the foundation and MediaWiki software to address.
> 
> There have also been proposals in the past to technically restrict the
> ability of MediaWiki:Common.css to affect anything outside page content, but
> that hasn't gotten anywhere. And I'm also not convinced that that'd be a
> good thing. There's plenty of grey area where it's technically outside the
> content area, but part of a larger customisation that doesn't interfere with
> the software interface.

Those might be reasonable changes for the future, but I don't think it's okay
to do such a major change without proper notice/release notes, and definitely
not appropriate to do in a security patch.

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