Hi Daniel,

Thank you for the update. I was wondering, how does the new Front-end Architecture Working Group relate to the existing Front-end Standards Group?[1] Does it replace the previous group or do they operate independently?

— [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1616/

Cheers, Máté Szabó SOFTWARE ENGINEER +36 30 947 5903

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On 20 Sep 2019, at 13:20, Daniel Kinzler dkinzler@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hi All,

Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting:

• RFC Last Call until 2019-10-02: Drop IE6 and IE7 basic compatibility and

security support https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T232563. This means we can remove code that works around issues with IE6 and IE7. If no concerns remain unaddressed by October 2nd, the RFC will be approved as proposed.

• Discussed: Kickoff of the Front-end Architecture Working Group (FAWG)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Front_End_Architecture_Working_Group. The purpose of the Frontent Architecture Working Group is to propose an architecture for a more modern front-end to MediaWiki, enabling a richer user experience. Efforts to modernize the user interface have often struggled with limitations imposed by MediaWiki core and the overall system architecture. FAWG is an effort by the Product and Technology departments to develop a mid-term plan to overcome these limitations.

• Discussed: Section headings with clickable anchor

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T18691. This is about a "link to this section" feature pegged for deployment on WMF wikis. The RFC is to make sure that there are no performance issues with this change.

• IRC discussion next week: Core REST API namespace and version

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T232485. This is about versioning strategies for public APIs. As always, the meeting will take place on Freenode in the #wikimedia-office channel, at 21:00 UTC (2pm PDT, 23:00 CEST).

You can also find our meeting minutes at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Minutes

See also the TechCom RFC board https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-rfcs/.

If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:TechCom_Radar

Cheers, Daniel

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On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 7:21 AM Daniel Kinzler dkinzler@wikimedia.org wrote:

The purpose of the Frontent Architecture Working Group is to propose an architecture for a more modern front-end to MediaWiki, enabling a richer user experience. Efforts to modernize the user interface have often struggled with limitations imposed by MediaWiki core and the overall system architecture.

When I read things like this, I worry that "limitations" that people want to get rid of include things like "basic functionality if the browser lacks JS/CSS (or has them disabled)" and "basic functionality on a fairly generic LAMP webhost, without running a bunch of bespoke services (even via containers)."

Note neither of those limitations preclude requiring more advanced technology for "a richer user experience", but IMO we should carefully consider the tradeoff each time we lock some functionality behind a "richer" wall.