>> Meanwhile, I agree with both Kris and Andrea's responses: you need to be >> specific about what problems you propose to fix, and you need to be >> extremely wary of breaking existing functionality just because it's >> "interesting" or "modern". > > +1. > > There are also a lot of technological constraints that aren't obvious > at a glance: not controlling our (entirely volunteer) mirrors means > that the baseline PHP functionality we can rely on is much, much lower > than you may expect. (Don't even ask about databases.) Remember, we > have literally no budget, and rely entirely on the generosity of our > hosting sponsors. > > I'm certainly not claiming that what we have in web-php today is good, > but it has the advantage of having been proven over a very long period > of time, being easily and widely distributed, and coping with the > loads that it has to. A rewrite would have to have compelling > advantages over that, and be done for better reasons than just "the > existing code is old and terrible".
Agreed: don't rewrite from scratch. I think our HTML/CSS is in need of a lift once browser adoption is better for some of the more recent improvements. Using something like Polymer for our front-end would drastically simplify the code and significantly improve the user experience. I've already done a port on my local copy and it works pretty nicely. However, I don't think Polymer is fully stable yet and I don't think we're ready to ditch IE 9 either. I haven't said anything on list about this because the browser adoption rates need to improve and Polymer (and other similar projects) need to stabilize. The reason I bring this up in this discussion is that switching to something like Polymer is going to require a few changes on how we generate the HTML and CSS. The the best time to refactor code is when you are already changing it for something already, so it would be better to delay refactoring code until we have some need to change it. --- Note: I had already sent this message, but noticed afterwards it was on wrong list. Now on webmasters and not internals. -- PHP Webmaster List Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
