Hi Luis --
I honestly don't see a lot of difference between Google, Twitter and Facebook, since they are all ad supported entities with a fiscal responsibility to track their users and sell the data. Apple's a bit different on the surface since they have a different business model. I agree that these are bad for the internet but so are incredibly slow web pages that make apps essentially required for a good experience.
On the analytics, this would probably not include their use of our content in the knowledge graph or elsewhere and also might be troublesome for those who prefer google not to track their reading.
Bryan's ticket is a good embarkation point for thinking about supporting new clients; Reading is also planning some Reading infrastructure work for the summit which could relate[1]
-Toby
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114542
On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Toby -
I'm generally 1000% on-board with slow follower for anything user-facing. The only reason I might make an exception here is because the competitors you mention are all pretty awful for the web generally, and this has uptake already from Google and Twitter. (Two isn't great, but two + slim opportunity for growth is way better than the guaranteed never-greater-than-1 we'll see from FB's option.)
The other reason this intrigues me is that if Google builds in some analytics, it might give us a better sense of their current usages for us than we currently have. Not much, obviously, but at least something. (Remember that in this scenario - direct access from Google properties - they already have all that information, the only question is whether it gets shared with us so that we can do something useful with it.)
That said, if implementing it is non-trivial, it doesn't make sense to spend a huge number of cycles to fast-follow. Hopefully some of the improvements Bryan mentions will make it easier in the future - it certainly doesn't look like we're in a world where the number of front ends is going to get smaller any time soon.
Luis
On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks Bryan and Pine.
My feeling is that there are many many new interfaces and form factors emerging right now and we should be cautious about adoption. For example Facebook's instant articles, apple news and even snapchat have similar offerings the AMP.
They all seem to be focusing on article speed in a landscape where most pages are larded up with a variety of trackers, ads and other scripts (which we don't have, although we have our own challenges on performance) with the ultimate goal of owning the delivery platform.
I'm nervous about picking winners in such a landscape although I'm excited about prototypes like things like the Apple Watch app that came out of the Lyon hackathon. I feel like a slow follower model where we see which solution if any becomes widely used is more appropriate for us.
-Toby
On Thursday, October 8, 2015, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Bryan,
Ah, I was thinking of the 2 different mobile web editing experiences (not 2 different apps) for Android depending on form factor. My understanding is that tablets have VE enabled on mobile web now (I have yet to try it) while phones do not have VE enabled on mobile web yet.
Pine On Oct 8, 2015 12:56 PM, "Bryan Davis" bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
We currently have at least 6 channels, I believe:
- Desktop Web
- Mobile Web
- Android phone
- Android tablet
I don't think that we have separate native apps for the phone and tablet form factors.
- IPhone
- Legacy Android phone
I'm no expert on mobile developmemt, but perhaps WMF could experiment
with
Google's idea on just one channel to start?
AMP would only be appropriate for the mobile web channel from the list above. Implementing it would be a matter of placing some sort of translating proxy between MediaWiki and the requesting user agent that downgraded the HTML produced by MediaWiki to AMP's restricted HTML dialect. That sort of translation might be possible in MobileFrontend but it would likely be accomplished much more easily using some other tech stack that had good support for manipulation of HTML like a node.js service. It might be an interesting prototype project for a volunteer to experiment with a frontend app that consumed the RESTBase provided Parsoid HTML (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/html/NOFX) and spit out AMP compliant documents.
The only other option really to produce alternate HTML from MediaWiki would require swapping out the existing layer that translates an article's wikitext to HTML with a version that spoke AMP instead. That would be related to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114194.
Bryan
Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation bd808@wikimedia.org [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855
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-- Luis Villa Sr. Director of Community Engagement Wikimedia Foundation *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.*