Last modified: 2009-04-06 16:15:51 UTC
Here's a trivial skin that adds close to no HTML around the article text. I wrote it for including HTML image description in the image dump (work in progress, feature request will follow sometime). It may also be usedful for people who use PDAs to view a wiki, and also for bots (less cruft to parse, less bytes to load). patch to follow in a minute.
Created attachment 953 [details] skins/Raw.php - raw skin (new file, not patched against CVS but against a dummy file)
Created attachment 955 [details] skins/Raw.php - IMPROVED raw skin (new file, not patched against CVS but against a dummy file) the new patch adds: * DOCTYPE declaration and similar xhtml cruft * http-equiv tags * interlanguage links The output now validates as XHTML.
Can we think about getting this implemented?
Isn't this what action=render is for?
Well action=render only allows you to view a page. This skin makes all pages minimal.
This skin would reduce server traffic, resulting from those many wiki bots out there, a lot! Test it with [[Volume]]! *When editing with 'full' monobook skin the page has >70KB *When removing all that unnecessary cruft the page has <10KB All page requests (many!) and finally bot edits (rather few) would produce much less traffic! Another idea would be to let bots edit through the new API (/w/api.php). A XML output would be as minimalistic as this skin...
(In reply to comment #4) > Isn't this what action=render is for? > mmm... I do agree, but it does not work if you want to actually get the wikitext of the page / edit the page. The actual methode used by pywikipedia is action=edit, and it is quite slow. Surely, we are working on a rewrite using the API, and our first results clearly indicate, if necessary, that this method is faster. But using the API to get the content does not make much sense if you eventually need to get action=edit to put your content...
(In reply to comment #7) > Surely, we are working on a rewrite using the API, and our first results > clearly indicate, if necessary, that this method is faster. But using the API > to get the content does not make much sense if you eventually need to get > action=edit to put your content... > Actually, editing through the API was finished some time ago, and it'll be included in the 1.13 release. The point is getting it enabled on Wikipedia (or at least at TestWiki for a start), which Brion either hasn't had time for or is unwilling to do.
(In reply to comment #0) > Here's a trivial skin that adds close to no HTML around the article text. I > wrote it for including HTML image description in the image dump (work in > progress, feature request will follow sometime). It may also be usedful for > people who use PDAs to view a wiki, and also for bots (less cruft to parse, less > bytes to load). > > patch to follow in a minute. *bots -> API - now r/w on WMF wikis *small screens -> special skin - now live on WMF wikis *I don't understand your third use case.
I'm going to mark this fixed per comment 9. We have the API for bots, and the minimal skin/mobile interface are both deployed by now. Specific issues with those things can be filed, but the general "make it" has been completed.
