On Wed Jan 07 2015 at 8:18:50 PM S Page <spage@wikimedia.org> wrote:
(I couldn't find a list for "Frontend standards group" and I'm not sure if all its engineers are on the design list.)

I congratulated James_F on IRC for VisualEditor/ OOjs UI adopting the mediawiki.ui style, but then it went topsy-turvy:

spagewmf I missed that VisualEditor is now using the mediawiki.ui  style formerly known as "Agora"
James_F No, we are not.
Agora and MediaWiki.ui are both previous designs. This one is different, apparently.
Don't ask me how. :-) It's mostly similar, at least.
It's the MediaWiki Theme for OOjs UI.

spagewmf  How is WMF keeping the "simple" mw-ui-button mw-ui-constructive and OOjs UI's more elaborate oo-ui-widget > oo-ui-buttonElement oo-ui-flaggedElement-constructive  CSS in sync?  Are we able to share LESS rules?
James_F  MW UI isn't being kept in sync with the new design, I believe. I don't think it's credible to try to marry the technologies together with shared files – it'd be a huge amount of work for a short-term hack.

spagewmf  The mw-ui- classes are a lot easier for humans to grok/reuse, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Clickable_button  It could be very cool for pages to have OOjs UI gadgets someday.
James_F  Well, tough. :-) MW-UI won't be around for much longer.

Yeah this is a little weird to hear. I haven't heard a single email on Wikitech-l or this list about progress toward deprecation. If the new themes for OOjs UI now match the Living Style Guide contents to the extent that it's no longer necessary, that's awesome progress. But it would be good to hear some public communication about any evolution of the standards and where we're at. 
 
How soon is "short-term" and "not much longer"? It's less than a year since mediawiki.ui.button made it into the default set of page modules and the Living Style Guide appeared. Are devs going to continue working on  $wgUseMediaWikiUIEverywhere to deliver UX consistency?

I understand the approach espoused by the Frontend standards group  is "use OOjs UI components" and I'm excited to see Bartosz prototyping the UserLogin form in oojs-ui/php. But it'll be a long time before the 15 extensions using mediawiki.ui have all transitioned to OOjs UI.

I look forward to the "Frontend standards" session at the developer summit.  “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Cheers,
--
=S Page  WMF Tech writer
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