Topic on Help talk:User contributions

On the go, I sometimes access Wikipedia and other wikis through its bare HTML interface, without multimedia, CSS, or JS, to maximize loading speed and minimize data plan consumption. (Some sites such as Quora and Twitter are useless without JS, but MediaWiki gladly works either way.).

But I have noticed a change at some point: The bracket characters in the revision history and user contributions are no longer part of the HTML, but implemented through CSS :before and :after pseudo elements. This means that the brackets are invisible without CSS activated, or when opening the page as HTML-only document.

What is the benefit of it?  I am not asking because of it bothering me (it does not), but for curiousity.

The relevant change appears to be gerrit:473315 with the commit message "In our quest to separate content from presentation, the parentheticals are moved into CSS." The linked task phab:T205581 suggests the motivation is to make it easier for different skins to customize the display. I don't believe readers of raw HTML were considered, nor do I think this is a use case we aim to support, but it's nice to hear this largely works well for you :)

I see. Thanks much! As a side note, in case it has not been mentioned so far, another thing affected by the change is that the brackets are not selected as text, therefore not copied to the clipboard, but that is rather trivial anyway.