User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Why Fandom Evolves: A Look Ahead in 2017/@comment-1824169-20170111185209/@comment-26402117-20170111195151

It is sad that for most wikis across Wikia and most MediaWiki projects, web development conventions are discarded. A lot of issues I've had with templates are caused by a lack of a consistent markup, the pain of maintaining templates that repeat inline styling and the horrible output of tabular layouts in the mobile skin. MediaWiki has also been cut a lot of slack, which hands out an accessible markup for tabular design yet does not make either HTML markup or CSS stylesheets more intuitive.

The portable infoboxes personally matched my needs well and gave me much desired integration into the mobile skin. I rather mislike unneeded vertical stacking, but Mercury doesn't have that on my phone. The skin also is designed to adapt whatever markup is used in the templates - bad or unadaptable code wosn't adapt. I've seen a user with a mobile Oasis stylesheet, but Oasis sucks on most phones. There's way too much swiping and zooming.