(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.
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 <http://tools.wmflabs.org/styleguide/desktop/section-2.html>
appeared. Are devs going to continue working on $wgUseMediaWikiUIEverywhere
to deliver UX consistency?
I understand the approach espoused by the Frontend standards group
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Frontend_standards_group> is "use OOjs UI
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/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