Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: > The front end that we have *now* is fast for some people. The point of > writing a new platform is to be able to do more, if we want.
Do more, such as? If there's a broader outlook here, a roadmap for the future, what is it and where is it posted? I think there's a reasonable expectation that if you're going to make claims like this and push forward on projects like ResourceLoader, there be a list of all the gains that are going to be made as a result of it, or at least a list of all the foreseeable gains from it. You're talking about "doing more." Be specific. I've looked at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader and Trevor has said that the non-public roadmap will soon be public, though it's my understanding that the roadmap is more about deployment, not about the grand vision of what ResourceLoader will enable in the future. Can you shed some light on this? >> The second issue is that you're focusing on the mess that was of your >> creation. There's a huge effort to clean up the insane amount of JavaScript >> that the UsabilityInitiative introduced. > > I think we have a large difference of vision here. > > By contemporary standards the amount of JS in the UsabilityInitiative, > and related projects, is a mere trifle. > > Our competitors invest a lot in Javascript infrastructure because they > find that every last efficiency is usually worth it. If stripping > newlines gives us 1K more per page, we can squeeze 1K more of usability > or other interface niceties in. Which competitors are you referring to here? You seem to be suggesting that a lot of other sites bog down their users' experience with an obscene amount of JavaScript, so it's okay for Wikimedia to do the same, albeit with a bit less JavaScript. This doesn't follow. You also seem to be creating a mostly false trade-off through the idea of premature optimization. There isn't a fixed size a page can be. Making the HTML output unreadable and adding a feature aren't mutually exclusive. To suggest that they are isn't fair. >> The third issue is that, unlike www.google.com, Wikimedia wikis are editable >> sites. People customize their experience via gadgets, user scripts, and >> other things of that nature. The same isn't true for Google's homepage. > > I agree this is a very good reason why we should hesitate before doing > anything that would obfuscate our pages. "View Source" doesn't work as > well on the web any more, and it should on Wikipedia. (I personally > would set the balance at a different point -- I'd like there to be a > note right in the page source explaining how to view an unoptimized > version.) > > That said, your assertion that Google doesn't allow customizations of > its page is just not true. Google has offered "skins" for something like > a year or more now, and their home page widget platform is literally > called Gadgets. > > http://www.google.com/ig/ I was talking about www.google.com, as was the post I was replying to. Google has iGoogle, that much is certain, but I don't see how that's relevant to the broader discussion, sharing the use of the term "gadgets" notwithstanding. I think it's possible that your answer to the "what are the future benefits of ResourceLoader?" question might make what you were trying to say here clearer. > Anyway, I think that's somewhat in the flavor of what the Resource > Loader people are trying to achieve here. Efficiency *and* community. > Minification *and* openness. Gadget-writers are a big part of their > targeted use cases. Otherwise, they would have just used something off > the shelf. There are a lot of good JS libraries out there, but none that > quite fit the needs of our community. The broad point of my previous reply was that minification and obfuscation come at a real cost and the acknowledgement of this cost seems to be non-existent from the people pushing ResourceLoader forward. That's my take from reading the past discussion on this list, but perhaps I'm completely off the mark. When people talk about "friction" but can't understand the source of this friction, that indicates a problem to me. And it seems to be directly incompatible with your stated goal of "efficiency *and* community." MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
