Trevor Parscal wrote:
We really need to just evolve Vector. It's not a sacred cow, and it's sort of sad how little it's been changed since I made in back in 2009. How it looks, how it works and how it responds to different devices can all be changed incrementally, and we can do this without continued or additional fragmentation.
Agreed, kind of.
I'm all for iterative improvements, but the trickiness here comes from Vector's identity as a skin. Skins, in my mind, are substantively about appearance. If we wanted to remove all the gradients from Vector, is it still Vector? What if we kill the sidebar? At what point does choosing Vector really mean not being able to choose anything because Vector is always evolving. That is, there's some sense in a stable skin choice.
Prateek is quite interested in making a new skin and I offered to help. My suggestion was to start with Vector as a base and slowly create a new skin from there. This way we can learn from and directly incorporate lessons learned in the development of Monobook and Vector, but we retain the flexibility to make larger (perhaps even "breaking") changes to the new skin, as we slowly expand the skin's usage and learn more about what people want and need in 2015 that perhaps wasn't possible or wasn't considered a priority in 2009. I'm hopeful that careful, incremental development using Vector as a base is the correct path forward.
So now we have Blueprint, Apex, Slate, and Minerva, I suppose.
MZMcBride