RFC: Adopt a modern JavaScript framework for use with MediaWiki

Post by majewsky » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #163

tantalor wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page Previews is a great example of leveraging "web app" that solves many problems at once: - quickly inform on a topic without clicking through (lower latency) - increase scanability (hence readability) - decrease expensive whole page loads - eliminate need to open many tabs https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews

Page Previews, specifically Hovercards can be implemented in a very simple way with plain JS [^1] and is clearly an enhancement - everything works just fine if hovercards don't load. But most features on Wikipedia aren't like that, and would be really hurt if you had to a JS bundle or otherwise deal with the usual bloated webapp nonsense. Wikipedia primarily needs to load quickly and be semantic with preferably simpl…

Post by tln » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #128

This thread reads to me like the engineers went into it already knowing they wanted Vue.js, and retroactively doing the necessary mental gymnastics to come up with a rationale. A better justification would have started with "these are our pain points, and this is our evaluation of how these options address our problems." Instead, it's full of weird things like this: >Better support for usage without Webpack/Babel/fro…

Post by manigandham » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

shirshak55 wrote: post #126

manigandham wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These directives take less than a day to learn. 99% of the time it's far easier to write HTML tags with data and event binding directives than hack around with JSX and passing all those props. You can also use JSX with Vue if you want. Just add a render() function to the component. That's what happens anyway when you use a normal template, the Vue compiler turns it into a render function the same way JSX is compiled…

and using promises with vue is nightmare.

Post by manigandham » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 3:21 PM UTC

honopu wrote: post #143

manigandham wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a subtle but huge difference. In React, using JSX means you can create components and mount them on top of the existing elements on the page. With Vue's HTML templates, the page itself can be the component and everything can become interactive. For example, you can easily output a HTML table from server-side code, then Vue can convert that into a interactive component while using the existing structure and data.…

I think you're talking about universal or isomorphic rendering, but each of these allow for it.

Post by MatthewPhillips » Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

EvanYou wrote: post #151

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #107

This is a bad idea. If you look at the list of advantages to doing this only 1 is user-centric (things would be reactive). The rest are all related to how it makes development easier. When you choose a developer-centric workflow your users will suffer. You only have to look at the numerous server to SPA conversions to see how consistently bad of a choice this tends to be; Reddit is a big and obvious example. They cou…

Who said they are going to make the entire page SPA? They picked Vue specifically because Vue allows them to progressively enhance parts of the page with interactivity without going full SPA (AND without hard reliance on a build step).