Page Description Language

Let’s consider some beautiful things!

As any designer will tell you it is quite hard to create beautiful content on Wikipedia in wikitext.  Our content is used on desktop, on mobile, in apps, in print, and in other places we're probably not even aware of, and it is a real challenge to make it look good in each of those formats.  Part of the problem is how we specify and place images and other media on the page, which is incredibly low-level (“give me a 200-pixel wide thumbnail exactly here”) and omits most semantic information about how the image is being used.

Can we have designers create different article layouts? Can we make "article style" into a first-class notion in MediaWiki?

For example, on desktop or in PDF form many articles are most readable in a two-column layout, but math-related articles tend to look better in a single column, since the mathematical expressions are often wide. How can we mark an article as "has wide content, looks best single column"?

What are the different categories of presentation? Can we expose "full width", "single column", "double column", "lead image", “side bar”, etc as properties authors can apply to media or content fragments? What others are needed?

The Multi-Content Revisions system lets us associate content in one or more "sidebar" slots with an article. How do we compose that with the rest of the page?

If you’ve ever used Desktop Publishing Software, you’re probably familiar with the frames those programs use to lay out a page.  Content can be poured into these frames to lay them out in columns, establish headings, pull quotes, sidebars, images, etc.

The big idea here, and I apologize for being a bit vague, is to associate a “page design” with a page or portion of a page—perhaps each section of the article has its own "design".  Within that "page design" we’d insert various bits of independent content stored in Multi-Content Revisions, including the main body text in the main slot, but also infoboxes, images, sidebars, pull quotes, footnotes, etc.^[1]

The page design would have variants for desktop, mobile, print, etc which use the content slots in different ways.

Here are some of the existing "page design" patterns in Wikimedia articles, from a larger set collected by User:MGalloway (WMF):

• Page design examples
• 
  Article Infobox
• 
  Illustrate and accompany content (large)
• 
  Give context to the mentioned article (medium, grouped)
• 
  Full-width image
• 
  Show views of the same object (grouped, share same description, fixed height)
• 
  To compare a few images (grouped, share the same title, fixed height)

The big idea here is that we’d be selecting from one of a library of templates like this, with associated semantic information and alternate layouts for mobile, etc, instead of trying to manually position content.

Next section: Native Script Editing