Jon Robson has become the only person who understands the special pages maintained by MobileFrontend. He is desperate to find a path of least resistance to removing those special pages. The fundamental problem is special pages that make use of feeds cannot be easily skinned.
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In this row, the characters "(", "...", ")" and "|" are part of the output and thus cannot be skinned differently by other skins.
Pseudo elements solve this by keeping the status quo for Vector while enabling other skins to do as they wish.
Currently:
```
<span class="mw-tag-markers">(<a href="/w/index.php?title=Special:Tags" title="Special:Tags">Tags</a>: <span class="mw-tag-marker mw-tag-marker-mobile_edit">Mobile edit</span>, <span class="mw-tag-marker mw-tag-marker-mobile_web_edit">Mobile web edit</span>, <span class="mw-tag-marker mw-tag-marker-mw-contentmodelchange">content model change</span>)</span>
```
Proposed HTML:
```
<span class="mw-tag-markers"><a href="/w/index.php?title=Special:Tags" title="Special:Tags">Tags</a>: <span class="mw-tag-marker mw-tag-marker-mobile_edit">Mobile edit</span>, <span class="mw-tag-marker mw-tag-marker-mobile_web_edit">Mobile web edit</span>, <span class="mw-tag-marker mw-tag-marker-mw-contentmodelchange">content model change</span></span>
```
Visual changes: None
To start with we will focus on Special:Contributions, and then expand out to other special pages e.g. Vector
== Checklist
For Special:Contributions:
[x] Provide a mechanism for handling '. .' separator in CSS
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[x] Provide a mechanism for handling '' | ' separator between diff/history links and brackets surrounding them
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[] Provide a mechanism for wrapping number of bytes change with CSS. Use it on Special:Contributions. [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/473314 | gerrit ]]
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[] Provide a mechanism for wrapping `comment` in brackets with CSS. Use it on Special:Contributions. [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/473315 | gerrit ]]
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[] Remove hardcoded parentheticals from ChangesList mw-tag-markers. Use it on Special:Contributions.
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[] pseudo elements used on mw-usertoollinks on Special:RecentChanges
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[] pseudo elements used on mw-changeslist-line-inner on Special:RecentChanges
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[] Update all special pages to use the new techniques (WIP: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/463141/)
[] Update Minerva to skin (WIP patch @ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/461795)