Last modified: 2006-06-18 07:54:32 UTC
All readers want to save copies of books/pages for reading locally. But when they do so, even with “Save entire page ” (“Save with images”) option, some elements of the layout lose their proper appearance. As far as I have noticed, affected are only the elements that are customised through external CSS, like MediaWiki: Common.css and MediaWiki:Standard.css (or Monobook.css). I suggest a solution like this: 1. All .css files are to be included in the page properly, through the <link ...> tag 2. The editable .css-files in the MediaWiki: namespace are to not just add to/overwrite the inbuilt stylesheet, but to replace it altogether: let there be only one global style sheet(MediaWiki:Common.css) and an additional one for the particular skin (MediaWiki:Monobook.css). Again, both of those should be neatly included with <link> tags, without further inline “features”.
File a bug with the browser.
(In reply to comment #1) > File a bug with the browser. It would be kind of you to check first. The URL is provided. I saved and viewed the page on newest versions of the three most popular different internet browsers, and got _ identical_ wrong results.
Display of http://ru.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby and a saved archive is identical in Safari 2.0.3. There's nothing wrong with the page. There may, however, be something wrong with the browsers you're using. Please report bugs in them to them.
Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer. And now I also checked different Wiki-projects and language partitions) Your dismissal of this bug, or “browser’s bug”, implies that all non-Safari users will not be able to save local copies of Wikimedia sites properly. (...)
We don't use <link> for these because the extensive modern CSS causes some older browsers such as Netscape 4 to completely destroy page legibility or even literally crash due to the massive massive errors in their CSS implementations. Style sheets are meant to degrade gracefully when missing (as on browsers that don't support them at all), so for the minority of people using wildly broken browsers it's preferable to let them read the page without pretty styles than to have their browser crash. Likewise it's preferable for the minority of people who use nonstandard on-disk archives of web pages to have legible, but plain-looking, pages than to break other peoples' ability to read anything at all on the site. If you want the saved pages to also be pretty, and your browser has a bug that causes it to not be pretty, contact the manufacturer of the browser and report the bug. If they fix it, it'll be fixed for everyone for all sites that use legal and proper CSS -- not just for you right now -- and it won't additionally break other peoples' ability to read anything on the site who are stuck with an older, seriously damaged browser.
