On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Would it be worth holding off on this for a bit and then putting it in the Agora extension when we've got it put together, then? The entire point of the extension (well, other than "stop increasing developer workload and long-term maintenance duties" and "don't make Roan cry by breaking protocol") is to allow us to make small, iterative tweaks structured in such a way as to avoid FOUCs.

As Trevor said: it's not a big amount of work, and I'm not really interested in creating dependencies where they don't already exist.

re: Erik's postion... Howie's email sums up the steps I'm going to take with S and Ori.

But I want to fundamentally reject a norm I think I am hearing here: that we should be working toward perfection upfront, rather than iteration. My philosophy is release something that is better than the current UI for the majority of users, then keep working until we feel good putting it in maintenance mode. You actually surface more and better feedback that way.

I'll also note we don't actually abide by the strictness of code and UI cleanliness we're talking about for browsers like IE6/7. For example, in testing it took about two seconds before the section edit link JS loaded. It took eight seconds or more for Vector's dropdown menus in the sidebar to close.

The experience of having a horde of people, most of whom are theoretically supposed to be enabling change, pile on a long overdue enhancement yet again is just depressing, and gives me little wonder why it takes so much effort to make even small improvements.