[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for the Wikimedia Foundation

[Robert Rohde]

If I understand the minutes of the VE / Parsoid quarterly review [1]
correctly, then significant changes for templates could be on the
table for the first half of calendar year 2014.  One of the largest
technical challenges for the handling of templates in the VE / Parsoid
context is that individual templates can have open-ended syntax where,
for example, one template opens a table and an different template
closes it (and even more ridiculous examples).  Hence the individual
templates are not necessarily closed units in themselves but may
interact with content from other parts of the pages, which creates
various problems for parsers.

In the minutes, the possibility of simply banning such open-ended
templates is mentioned, though the reply in the minutes suggests that
such an option was seen as probably too disruptive of existing
content.  Hence the developers mentioned a need to find better ways to
enforce the nesting of templates while also supporting all (or at
least most) existing content.

However, it does seem likely that devs are discussing changes to the
way templates are handled that would move away from the current
structure where templates are allowed to contain completely arbitrary
blocks of wikitext that would only be interpreted once the whole page
is assembled.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews/VisualEditor-Parsoid/July_2013

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Martijn Hoekstra
<martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 24, 2013 9:57 AM, "Erik Moeller" <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:25 AM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Should that even be a concern? I mean, if lots of newbies and
>> > technophobes start using the Visual Editor and a bunch of us
>> > dorks who love writing markup don't, would that matter?
>>
>> That's a great question, Tom. :)
>>
>> We're confident that in the long run, we'll be able to offer features
>> and capabilities that will give experienced community members
>> compelling reasons to use VisualEditor, so when people say things like
>> "I will never use VisualEditor", I can only note that never is a very
>> long time, and the bulk of our continued effort will go into making
>> VisualEditor the best possible editing experience it can be.
>>
>> This is not a feature we're launching and forgetting about. This isn't
>> an effort that's scheduled to end. Enabling collaboration is part of
>> our core mission; it's at the heart of what we do. We've got our work
>> cut out for us for the next few months, and we also know what some of
>> the longer term objectives are (integration with discussions,
>> real-time collaboration). Beyond that - sky's the limit.
>>
>> So, does it matter if people continue to use markup? Probably not -
>> but if you're a human, we'll aim to give you a much better tool to get
>> the job done. So even if you are, as you put it, a markup-loving dork,
>> we hope you'll come visit us in VisualEditor-land every once in a
>> while and mingle with us. We do have cookies, and tales of template
>> madness.
>>
>> Erik
>> --
>> Erik Möller
>
> Speaking of template madness, the current horrible brokenness that are
> templates seem to be on the long term roadmap to be fixed. Fixing them
> requires breaking a whole lot, far more than a visual editor preference. Is
> two way community dialog on how to handle that on the roadmap? It might
> still be years and years away, but boy will it hurt, and we better brace
> ourselves.
>
>> VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
>>
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