User blog comment:Ciencia Al Poder/Portable Infoboxes, the first step into Wikia taking control over our content/@comment-26923519-20170501165720/@comment-26402117-20170511092216

Classes do not standardise the content, only the presentation. They do not structure the data to produce functionality like the Mercury Hero infobox image. When will an image have a semantic content meaning in a wikitext infobox?

The classes mean nearly nothing in the grand scope of what Portable Infoboxes does, because the end result of rendering on both skins are so very different. Solutions that use classes to define workarounds for the lack of content adaptability don't mix well with further development, like the MW workarounds in the codebase of those other extensions you speak of. To be more direct and more standard to web philosophies, it is natural to structure the infobox layout semantically and make that adaptable on the lowest level - the machine level.