Here's the current recommendation for CSS to suppress or hide square brackets: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T370512#10213456

It would be great if Parsoid could use the same mechanism for now, of wrapping the bracket character in <span class="cite-bracket">.

In the future, I hope we can add a "community configuration" setting which prevents generation of the brackets in the first place...

I hope we can add a "community configuration" setting which prevents generation of the brackets in the first place...

I think it's possible to argue that this is about how footnote markers visually appear, and conclude that everything related to that should be done with CSS, not via configuration. Similar to making the footnote markers bold, for example. This should also be done with CSS and not by adding <b> (which is what's still done in many places for historical reasons).

Note: In my detailed investigation in T335129#9631804 I found that 4 wikis currently remove the square brackets, and 9 more wikis wrap them in <span> (some to hide them via CSS, others to style them a little bit). This possibly means that the wikis that need this as a feature are only a few more obscure, smaller ones, and we shouldn't invest to much resources here. Giving them an option to add a line to their global CSS should be enough, in my opinion.

In T376717#10213459, @awight wrote:

Here's the current recommendation for CSS to suppress or hide square brackets: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T370512#10213456

It would be great if Parsoid could use the same mechanism for now, of wrapping the bracket character in <span class="cite-bracket">.

Note that CIte's Parsoid implementation doesn't do this currently -- so this will need to be implemented before the CSS fix can apply to Parsoid HTML.

In T376717#10449371, @ssastry wrote:

In T376717#10213459, @awight wrote:

Here's the current recommendation for CSS to suppress or hide square brackets: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T370512#10213456

It would be great if Parsoid could use the same mechanism for now, of wrapping the bracket character in <span class="cite-bracket">.

Note that CIte's Parsoid implementation doesn't do this currently -- so this will need to be implemented before the CSS fix can apply to Parsoid HTML.

Patch to add that is https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Cite/+/1082732

Change #1082732 had a related patch set uploaded (by WMDE-Fisch; author: Awight):

[mediawiki/extensions/Cite@master] Parsoid: configurable .cite-bracket square brackets

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1082732

Change #1082732 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/Cite@master] Parsoid: configurable .cite-bracket square brackets

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1082732

Let's write TechNews announcement for this!

Draft for User-notice:

Slight changes to that text :-)

In T376717#10608992, @WMDE-Fisch wrote:

Slight changes to that text :-)

Interface administrators on wikis that hide brackets around footnotes should update these customization. Currently some projects use CSS and a custom cite_reference_link MediaWiki message to hide brackets. These projects should adjust their CSS rules as described here. The new parser and VisualEditor do not work with the deprecated customization. Ideally admins should revert the message to it's default for best compatibility.

Ping @Quiddity to look at the draft in my last comment already. We might add the text next week for the issue that follows that week. ;-)

Moved the discussion around the communication to the existing subtask