These changes will probably result in some minor adjustments to existing skins. (I will try not to completely break compatibility cuz I know there are many custom skins out in the wild that would be no fun to stop working once they update medaiWiki)
This consolidation of <head> includes _may_ result in _some_ un-updated skins referencing the same files twice which I think most browsers genneraly handle "oky"
Enabling $wgEnableScriptLoader will not work so well with skins that have not been updated. Should have a patch soon. more about scriptLoader: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ScriptLoader (We will most likely ship with $wgEnableScriptLoader off by default )
I am also very excited about jQuery making its way into core. Things like the add_media_wizard are much easier to put together with jQuery's nifty abstractions and msg system. More about add media wizard: http://metavid.org/blog/2009/03/27/add-media-wizard-and-firefogg-on-test-wik...
peace, michael
Brion Vibber wrote:
Just a heads-up --
Michael Dale is working on some cleanup of how the various JavaScript bits are loaded by the skins to centralize some of the currently horridly spread-out code and make it easier to integrate in a centralized loader so we can serve more JS together in a single compressed request.
Unless there's a strong objection I'd be very happy for this to also include loading up the jQuery core library as a standard component.
The minified jQuery core is 19k gzipped, and can simplify other JS code significantly so we can likely chop down wikibits.js, mwsuggest.js, and the site-customized Monobook.js files by a large margin for a net savings.
If you've done browser-side JavaScript development without jQuery and wanted to kill yourself, I highly recommend you try jQuery -- it's sooooo nice. :)
-- brion
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