On Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:14:37 -0700, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:

Greetings all,

Last month Arthur made significant strides to remove a lot of WMF customizations inside MobileFrontend (http://bit.ly/Ht9StP). That was a good first step at addressing the issues rasied in http://bit.ly/HZbgVW but more needs to be done if we want to reach Brion's vision of,

"One codebase to do everything except WAP".

In order to do this, MediaWiki at its core has to become device aware. We have to get to a point where providing output for desktop, mobile, tablet, etc is as simple as described in bugzilla:30405 (http://bit.ly/I70xI7)

1 demerit for using a 3rd party short url in a persistent email: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30405#c2

We've drawn up a task list and documented it at http://bit.ly/Hw5TbT .

(or rather 2) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_support_in_MediaWiki_core

While some tasks block on the new parser most do not. Specifically

• Move mobile actions to special pages (in order to avoid caching

related issues)

• Move DOM parsing to core
• Improve DOM parser caching
• Skinning + making MW device aware

are all tasks that can be picked up now. If you've wanted to hack on mobile then this is a great time to set the future of how editors, developers, etc create device aware solutions.

Please throw up comments on the discussion page and join us on #wikimedia-mobile.

— Tomasz

+INF

Mobile should not be something complex for site administrators to setup. It should be a built-in feature ready to go right out of the box. Especially so after brion recommended dropping the m. subdomains and going with cookies that'll work anywhere. Mobile is growing, nowadays practically every site is at some point going to be visited by someone with a mobile device wanting to look something up. In fact I have a wiki myself which has over 53% of it's traffic going to mobile devices. So it should be on us to ensure that wikis are able to offer a good experience to those users without even trying.