Last modified: 2007-05-01 18:18:18 UTC
After clicking the "edit" button, the user receives in the HTML for instance a big <div class="mw-editTools"> with hundreds of templates and special charachters (IPA, etc.). Some users want to stop receiving and seeing this toolbar. There's a preference like "Don't show edit toolbar" or similar, but it just adds a CSS rule not to show it. In the HTML there's still the code, and that's exactly the problem: if the user doesn't want to see the toolbar, it shouldn't be in the HTML code. I'm talking of more than 100 Kb per edit (in Wikipedia), also this would speed the page load and save bandwith costs.
The "Don't show edit toolbar" preference applies only to the little icons at the top of the edit box in the <div id="toolbar">, not the potentially massive [[MediaWiki:Edittools]] thing with all the foreign characters and stuff. The latter is completely unaffected by the preference. If you would like to a) rename the preference more clearly and/or b) include a preference for disabling display of [[MediaWiki:Edittools]] and/or c) having the existing preference affect [[MediaWiki:Edittools]] and/or d) having Inputbox be more space-efficient in its output, please file separate bugs. (Note that it's much less than 100 KB, probably 10 KB or less. Content is served gzipped, and it should compress excellently due to the extremely high repetition.)
For b) see bug 9754
