mboverload wrote:
Wait, does this mean Mediawiki is going to get some AJAX elements? Has that been tried outside of Google in a large scale?
MediaWiki has already got some AJAX elements. We've had a server-side distribution framework since March, and an initial application to go with it: a search as you type feature. That particular feature is probably impractical on Wikipedia due to the server load, but there are plenty of other features which can be implemented which can be done quite efficiently. For example, I imagine the responses for the category browser could be cached by squid, and purged in the same way that category pages are currently purged. From the server point of view, it's a lightweight way to deliver category data, compared to full category pages.
Some Wikipedia users have been using AJAX for quite some time, via their user javascript. I'd like to see those features available to everyone, if server load allows. And it's easier to optimise for server load if the development effort on the server side and the client side is integrated. There are of course other advantages to integration: client-side developers are prone to spending huge amounts of time trying to extract data from the machine-unfriendly UI, when an XML or JSON server-side API could be trivially implemented.
I know there are a lot of usability and accessibility concerns relating to AJAX, but hopefully, by collaborating with users, we can avoid the worst of them. This isn't some ecommerce shopping basket rush job, thrown together overnight by a couple of overpaid consultants. Wikipedia has always aimed to be accessible from the widest variety of systems.
-- Tim Starling