On 07/17/2013 06:25 PM, Jon Robson wrote:
This seems like a bad habit to have got ourselves
into... All it
takes is a trailing comma somewhere and a gadget could take out a
whole browser.
Browsers should not crash due buggy JavaScript. It happens, but in my
experience it's not as common as people think.
More importantly, all it takes is one trivial edit to disable a broken
gadget.
I'm not disagreeing that this workflow gets
results - it obviously does - but
I think we should be striving to identify good Gadgets and giving
them love and attention for the good of everyone.
I completely agree that there are gadgets that could beneficially be
made into extensions or (at least partly) moved to core. And a lot of
gadgets could certainly benefit from modernization.
But I don't think we should act like gadgets are a bad thing, merely
because they aren't written the same way an extension or core is.
We do need to ensure gadgets are secure and useful. But there's a clear
benefit to the way they're developed with fewer constraints, both for
experimentation and for local wiki flexibility (flexibility which
everyone, including the WMF, has benefited from).
Speaking as a long-time Wikipedian, gadget developer, constant user of
useful gadgets (from Navigation popups to Hotcat and more), and now WMF
software engineer.
Matt Flaschen