I agree that it's important to move away from desktop-first, but
switching to mobile-first isn't the answer either. For complex products
(discussion boards, skins, anything that could benefit from a lot of
space), there are going mobile-specific styles same as any other
resolution - do ANY as the 'main', and you're having to undo and
override those styles on every other one, which results in unnecessarily
complicated and large code, which just makes it all that much harder to
maintain and work with.
As an example, this is an important part of why it's been so hard to
make Vector properly responsive - so many of the desktop styles needed
to be overridden in order for any mobile design to be applied. (This
would have applied in either direction because its desktop and mobile
layouts are so completely different.) But suppose that same step had
been replaced with instead separating out the desktop styles into a
separate stylesheet for a similar amount of effort, and with each as
separate, independent stylesheets - code for both desktop and mobile
would be made cleaner, and far easier to iterate upon. (People wanted me
to iterate on what's there now and I couldn't even figure out where to
begin. Not that I'm that good at CSS in the first place, but that code
is scary.)
What we need to do is get better at distinguishing and leveraging the
common styles, and using common variables and mixins, because this is
how you make consistent overall styles and also simplify the overall
thing. Then build these into something that works for each platform.
And if we're going to support stupid broken things, we need to
explicitly support them with some sort of fallback that doesn't require
a lot of manual rejigging. I'm not sure IE8, as an ancient desktop
browser, getting mobile styles is really any better than an ancient
mobile browser getting desktop styles.
On 14/11/15 22:39, Jon Robson wrote:
The solution to this is to do true mobile first development e.g. wrap your
desktop and tablet styles in media queries. Rendering a mobile site in IE8
is an acceptable trade off and ensures the content remains readable which
is the most important thing here.
We (Wikimedia devs) still build desktop first in all our major projects and
we really need to shift away from this. We can't simply build for desktop
and then adapt it to work on mobile which seems to be a common
misconception by anyone who hasn't built things for mobile. This approach
is costly as we end up rebuilding things we've already built to make them
work on mobile. We used to have a mobile department that pretty much did
this as a full time job but now that has gone we really need to adopt this
tried and tested approach.
On 13 Nov 2015 2:20 a.m., "Isarra Yos" <zhoris...@gmail.com> wrote:
Perhaps I should clarify why this is a problem. In fully responsive skins,
you generally have separate stylesheets for desktop, mobile, really big
desktop, whatever in order to keep the CSS rules simple and not redundant
(to avoid having mobile overriding desktop rules or visa versa, you just
only send the mobile styles to mobile, the desktop to desktop). You do this
by setting maximum and minimum screen sizes in the @media queries, but the
problem is, IE8 does not support this, and will not load a stylesheet at
all if these sizes are set. So you need to give it the desktop styles some
other way, without the @media size rules present.
While it is possible to simply add CSS to the page header using
outputPage, probably bypassing RL and all that entirely, this only works
with CSS, not LESS, because all the LESS magic is happening within RL. So
without RL, that means you need to render your desktop stylesheet into CSS
for this, which means you now need to maintain it in two different places
even though it's the same rules in both.
Using js got around this whole problem as with that you can simply check
the browser there and then conditionally mw.loader.load a size-free module
for IE8.
Is there any other way around this?
On 12/11/15 02:56, Isarra Yos wrote:
Is there a way to conditionally load RL modules for folks using IE8?
Because I couldn't figure out any proper way to do that in my skins and
I've just been using js to do it instead as a result.
But that's not going to work anymore. But it's also stupid regardless.
On 12/11/15 02:11, Krinkle wrote:
Hey all,
Starting in January 2016, MediaWiki will end JavaScript support for
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. This raises the cut-off up from MSIE 7.
Users with this browser will still be able to browse, edit, and otherwise
contribute to the site. However, some features will not be available to
them. For example, the enhanced edit toolbar will not appear, and the
notification buttons will take you to a page rather than a pop-out.
This change will affect roughly 0.89% of all traffic to Wikimedia wikis
(as
of October 2015). For comparison, 0.33% of traffic comes from Internet
Explorer 6, and 1.46% from Internet Explorer 7. Support for these was
dropped in August and September 2014 respectively.
Providing JavaScript for IE 8 adds a significant maintenance burden. It
also bloats the software we ship to all users, without proportionate
benefit. This enables us to simplify and streamline the JavaScript
codebase
for all other users. Users unable to upgrade from Internet Explorer 8
will
have a faster experience going forward, based on well-tested and more
stable code.
This change will land in the development branch in January, and so will
be
part of MediaWiki 1.27 (to be released around May 2016).
Tech News will announce this change as well, but please help carry this
message into your communities. In January, we will send a reminder before
the change happens.
Yours,
-- Krinkle
For details about the JavaScript-less experience, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility
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