[Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles
All, TL;DR: * References made using Cite will be configurable with a different system * New approach being prototyped in Parsoid's native implementation of the Cite extension The Cite extension[0], which provides in-page footnotes is a crucial part of how many of us use wikis, especially for Wikipedias. However, it was written a very long time ago, even by MediaWiki standards, and in its creation, we made some design choices which made sense at the time, but don't work very well for us anymore. As CSS has gotten more features, and those features have become more reliably implemented in modern browsers, we have more choices now. One of the great things about the Cite extension is its flexibility, such as each wiki being able to choose how the footnotes display to readers. Unfortunately, the means by which this flexibility is provided is currently done through a series of 14 different MediaWiki namespace wikitext messages which are interpreted to create the HTML to display to the user. This has a number of disadvantages. Most wikis use the default values (and even very experienced users are probably unaware of how it works or even that it can be changed). Because they are implemented in wikitext, per-user changes such as with a gadget or a user script aren't possible to do neatly (and instead need JavaScript to re-write the content, which is slower and more complex), and changes take up to 30 days to be visible to anonymous users whilst they wait for the cache to change. Due to how MediaWiki's messages system works, changes to the display styles need to be copied into each of the ~300 display languages for users, else those users with different languages will see different reference styles on the same page. Any system that wishes to display MediaWiki references has to implement most of MediaWiki just to format these references correctly. To fix this, the Parsoid and editing teams are proposing to replace the current way to configure the Cite extension with some CSS rules, which will solve these issues. Experimenting will be much easier to do on a per-user or gadget-basis in advance of making larger changes. Styles will be shared by all users of the wiki, regardless of their preferred language, and complicated user scripts or gadgets that slow down the system will not be needed to change the style. Changes will be instant for all users, even those logged out, and non-MediaWIki users can use styles to correctly and consistently display references. A currently-under-review patch[1] for Parsoid demonstrates use of CSS to do variations found on enwiki, eswiki, and fawiki. We think that this approach will allow us to match each of the current styles used on Wikimedia wikis. If there is any variation (currently in use) that we should experiment with, please let us know. We plan to continue to prototype this approach in Parsoid and work through any rendering issues. Given that most Wikimedia wikis don't customize the extension, for most Wikimedia wikis, we expect this will work with the basic configuration (and for a few Wikipedias which need different configuration, we will add styling). Once we port this solution over to the master branch of the Cite extension, this will be a breaking configuration change in the MediaWiki 1.25 release. If you have a gadget or user script which changes how references appear or relies on something local to your wikis, you may need to tweak it. Given that older browsers (IE6 and IE7 most notably) may not implement the CSS features that we need for this, we don't plan to rely solely on a CSS-based approach. Our current approach is to use a default bare HTML style on browsers that don't support content generation (like ::after and counters). We invite your comments, feedback, and help with this. Thanks, Marc, Parsoid and Editing teams. [0] – https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite [1] – https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/170936/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles
On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 5:44 AM, Marc Ordinas i Llopis marc...@wikimedia.org wrote: Due to how MediaWiki's messages system works, changes to the display styles need to be copied into each of the ~300 display languages for users, else those users with different languages will see different reference styles on the same page. That sounds like bug T33216, which was fixed a while ago. Does this actually occur now? -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles
On 12/16/2014 07:45 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote: On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 5:44 AM, Marc Ordinas i Llopis marc...@wikimedia.org wrote: Due to how MediaWiki's messages system works, changes to the display styles need to be copied into each of the ~300 display languages for users, else those users with different languages will see different reference styles on the same page. That sounds like bug T33216, which was fixed a while ago. Does this actually occur now? Though I'm not completely sure this is the one in question, for quite some time there has been a known issue[1] with the way MediaWiki's message fallback chain is implemented. A patch[2] to fix this was posted for review, and I left some comments on it almost a year ago. There have been no updates since. [1]: Multiple reports: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3495 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T48579 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T50956 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T57473 [2]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/72867/ -- Kevin Israel - MediaWiki developer, Wikipedia editor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PleaseStand ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Live preview
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/131346/ was finally merged. Kudos! Il 09/11/2014 22:02, Derk-Jan Hartman ha scritto: Hi all, I've had a significant update to Live Preview in the pipeline for a while now. It brings a few major improvements, the most important of it being able to load resourceloader modules that the preview requires, fixing a whole slew of problems that the old implementation had. The only place where it is a bit limited is with regard for previewing the list of languages in in skins other than vector. The code is here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/131346/ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/131346/ And it could use some user testing and review. Some people have been asking me about this lately, so I figured time to strip the WIP tag of it and see if we can get this merged already. Long term, I would like to improve it to make use of mw.template for some of the elements, but that is not a necessity right now I think. DJ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki flame graphs
Le 16/12/2014 00:42, Ori Livneh a écrit : I'm writing to draw your attention to a newly-available resource for performance analysis: flame graphs of MediaWiki code. http://performance.wikimedia.org/xenon/svgs/ Flame graphs are a visualization of application stack traces. Each application server on the Wikimedia cluster has a software timer that interrupts MediaWiki once every ten minutes to capture a stack trace. The stack trace shows what the code the application server was in the process of executing when the timer expired. A central log aggregator collects these traces and uses them to generate flame graphs. Each box in a flame graph represents a function in the stack. The y-axis shows stack depth. The topmost box shows the function that was on-CPU at the moment the trace was captured. The function below a function is its parent. The x-axis spans the sample population. The width of the box shows the total time it was on-CPU or part of an ancestry that was on-CPU, based on sample count. Here is an example: http://performance.wikimedia.org/xenon/svgs/hourly/2014-12-15_22.svgz To learn more about flame graphs and how to interpret them, see http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html. Well done Ori, they are lovely and make me think of the 90's ascii arts. -- Antoine hashar Musso ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Tech Talk: API Client Libraries: January 6th
Please join us for the following tech talk: *Tech Talk**:* A developer's-eye view of API client libraries: how to choose them, how to make them, how to make them better *Presenter:* Frances Hocutt *Date:* January 6 *Time:* 1830 UTC http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=tech+talk%3A+API+client+librariesiso=20150106T1830p1=%3Aam=30 Link to live YouTube stream http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz__duVeaWY *IRC channel for questions/discussion:* #wikimedia-office Google+ page https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103470172168784626509/events/c8fnclmkeam2gbrng1cn0g99mi0, another place for questions *Talk description: *This talk will cover why developers do (and don't) use any of the wide variety of client libraries available to get and post data through the MediaWiki API. We'll talk about writing tools with an eye to developer experience, go through the gold standard for MediaWiki API client libraries (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Client_code/Gold_standard) and the thinking behind it, and share some of the resources available for both library writers and library users. If you write or maintain an API client library, you'll learn about what you can do to help your library get out of the way and let developers who work with it spend their mental energy on putting together exciting projects, not on fighting with tools. If you work with the MediaWiki API (write bots, do research, maintain wikis), you'll learn what to consider when you're choosing a framework for your project. Either way, you'll start to appreciate all the factors beyond a library's code that make the difference between fun and easy development and a frustrating slog. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles
On 16 December 2014 at 04:45, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjor...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 5:44 AM, Marc Ordinas i Llopis marc...@wikimedia.org wrote: Due to how MediaWiki's messages system works, changes to the display styles need to be copied into each of the ~300 display languages for users, else those users with different languages will see different reference styles on the same page. That sounds like bug T33216, which was fixed a while ago. Does this actually occur now? No, this is talking about the problem of changing the rendering styles needing to be done in each of the customised languages manually through the translation system (and being totally unlike what the translation system on TranslateWiki.net generally uses and is suited for). It was not meant to be referring to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T33216, which I believe is still fixed, yes. J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles
At the risk of sounding stupid, does this mean other wikis will need a Parsoid instance to use this extension, or is this simply being tested in a Parsoid environment and it's just using CSS instead of wikitext for rendering? If the former, not a fan of the idea at all. If the latter, awesome, sounds like a great idea. I'm still confused on the exact details of how this will work, so I'd appreciate clarification. From: jforres...@wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 18:10:46 -0800 To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles On 16 December 2014 at 04:45, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjor...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 5:44 AM, Marc Ordinas i Llopis marc...@wikimedia.org wrote: Due to how MediaWiki's messages system works, changes to the display styles need to be copied into each of the ~300 display languages for users, else those users with different languages will see different reference styles on the same page. That sounds like bug T33216, which was fixed a while ago. Does this actually occur now? No, this is talking about the problem of changing the rendering styles needing to be done in each of the customised languages manually through the translation system (and being totally unlike what the translation system on TranslateWiki.net generally uses and is suited for). It was not meant to be referring to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T33216, which I believe is still fixed, yes. J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [BREAKING CHANGE] Plans to move Cite configuration from wikitext messages to CSS styles
On 16 December 2014 at 21:07, Arcane 21 arc...@live.com wrote: At the risk of sounding stupid, does this mean other wikis will need a Parsoid instance to use this extension, or is this simply being tested in a Parsoid environment and it's just using CSS instead of wikitext for rendering? If the former, not a fan of the idea at all. If the latter, awesome, sounds like a great idea. The latter; this has become a pressing need for faithful replication of expected styles for pages rendered using Parsoid, but we'll do this in both the regular Cite extension and the current re-implementation of it inside Parsoid. They will share the styling so that it will just work. I'm still confused on the exact details of how this will work, so I'd appreciate clarification. Right now we've not yet confirmed that we can entirely replicate all the features and configurations that people are using in Cite via the existing messages in the new CSS system. This is mostly a please help and/or tell us if we're crazy e-mail. :-) J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
