NOTE: current status T205581#4891329
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. This forced the mobile site to re-invent these pages for mobile. I'm keen to reduce some(all?) of this code by making upstream changes in core that provide more flexibility to skin developers.
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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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[X] 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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[x] Provide a mechanism for wrapping `comment` in brackets with CSS. Use it on Special:Contributions. [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/462008 Remove hardcoded parentheticals from ChangesList "comments" | gerrit ]]
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[x] Remove hardcoded parentheticals from ChangesList mw-tag-markers. Use it on Special:Contributions.[[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/473315 | gerrit ]]
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[x] pseudo elements used on uctop [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/473991 | gerrit ]]
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[x] pseudo elements used on mw-usertoollinks on Special:RecentChanges [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/475239 | gerrit ]]
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[x] Watchlist and RecentChanges style diff and hist links using pseudo elements [[ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/475240 | gerrit ]]
[] [[ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain?useskin=minerva&useformat=desktop&action=history | History page ]] uses mw-changeslist-links for mw-history-histlinks, history-size, mw-usertoollinks and mw-changeslist-separator and mw-history-undo
{F28212177} https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/490485 History page is now using pseudo elements for presentation
[] pseudo elements used on mw-changeslist-line-inner on Special:RecentChanges
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[] Ensure all special pages are using the new techniques (WIP: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/463141/)
[] Convert styles to skinStyles to allow skins to override them (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/499016)
[] Update Minerva to skin (WIP patch @ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/461795)