User blog comment:CzechOut/How Portable Infoboxes Can Change Your Style/@comment-1142365-20160708232030/@comment-188432-20160709005043

Heya :) Thanks for your comments. Just wanted to zoom in on a few points.

The post doesn't say that you have to choose the same style for every box. Rather, it says that it makes sense to consider whether the transition to portable infoboxes is a time to re-evaluate your current color choices. Uniformity of color is one option, but far from the only one discussed. It then goes on to give one example where the original is recreated faithfully, and one where the original is modified, mainly for reasons of better legibility. And, finally, I presented an extreme example of a theme-per-infobox approach.

The point about a wiki having 2K lines of CSS was simply that fewer lines of code are easier to maintain than more. It wasn't a reference to what devices could handle, but rather what human beings can easily search through and remember.

When you have so many different styles, you're naturally going to wonder at some point, "Does Infobox A have the same basic styling as Infobox H? Or was it Infobox C that looked like Infobox P?" And then you have to search through them all to try to figure it out.

Now imagine that it's 2019, and a totally new admin team is in place. And they have to make sense of this huge file. That's gonna be quite a challenge. As the final paragraph notes, some older wikis present a hodgepodge of different designs from different eras.

Changing to portable infoboxes thus gives local admin a chance to do some spring cleaning. The example given was of a community that chose to stay with a theme-per-infobox approach. And that's fine. This blog post doesn't say you can't do that; just that there's a consequence to that decision.

In fact, the whole reason I decided to include that example was because it was exclusively my own work, not that of local users. I wanted to share it because I thought my experience of manipulating such a large amount of theming might be useful. I thought it showed that the base PI code can absolutely handle intricate theming better than the human writing it could!

In any event, this blog post existed primarily to start a discussion about CSS possibilities on local wikis. I also wanted to make sure people were acquainted with color contrast theories. It's important that the needs of readers with differing visual acuities be contemplated. That way, more people can continue reading Wikia articles for longer periods of time without experiencing eye strain.