Thanks, Brion!

On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:32 AM, Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org> wrote:
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> On a slow connection pulling down multiple sections in one blob is tricky -- JSON decoders don't normally stream so we end up being pretty slow with that "second section and beyond" request.

You still can request separate sections. 
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> I would love to be able to include action=query stuff along with a mobile view request, such as grabbing the current user and site metadata.

Sigh, without core support we can only do one-offs to return select parts in mobileview. Is there anything particular that you want? Also, it's not a browser environment and you can actually make a couple reqests in parallel to e.g. decouple siteinfo retrieval.
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> Handling reference popups is dependent on loading the refs section, which appears somewhere near the end. See above about slow connections. Could we preextract them and ship them with the first section as metadata?

Already possible: &sections=0|references 
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> There are some oddities with remote file pages not returning a mod timestamp.

That's an interesting problem: the wiki itself doesn't know if a remote repository page has changed, so we have either to not cache the information about such pages (will be slow) or expect this information to be outdated. 
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> Exposing CSS and scripting modules for extensions used would be nice. Alternately we can try to retool things intoself contained embeddable I frames.

This is something worth investigating (as well as returning mw.config values related to page being retrieved), however I suspect that there will be a few wwonderful obstacles to work around, as a lot of extensions just add their modules/variables to OutpuPage in hooks scarily close to page display, making a lot of assumptions that are not true for API page views.
 
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Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])