When discussing with Timo we noticed VisualEditor was doing something very similar to mobile with parsed messages but was actually doing it a lot better. So yes I think the current existing model of bunging things into extensions is bad. It decreases visibility of work and leads to various incompatible forks as we end up working in silos.
I would love us to reverse this anti-pattern and start putting stuff like this straight into core and iterating on it together. MobileFrontend is already in many ways dependent on VisualEditor, Echo, Thanks and various other extensions. We've seen this issue with styling across extensions (which has led to the construction of mediawiki.ui in core) and I would like us to see us take this approach for other basic things (another one coming to mind is some kind of JS framework - the fact mobile is using its own lightweight framework, VisualEditor is using OOJS and various other extensions are cutting their own versions / pulling in some sort of framework also highlights a problem. The problem with both Flow and MobileFrontend being dependent on another extension is that when yet another new extension is built it won't necessarily think to use this extension and will end up using its own templating language/method of shipping templates to the client when it sees there is nothing like that in core. If we are worried about providing incomplete features to 3rd party users e.g. templating without a standard library maybe we should be maintaining a Wikimedia fork of MediaWiki where we can do this stuff but I don't think this kind of behaviour can continue. _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
