Frontend standards group/2014-09-19-Weekly

Kickoff meeting agenda (2014-09-19)

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Discussion (~10min)

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  • Who is on the team?
    • Members were chose by time available, previous work, critical to the groups success
  • How can the group can be most effective?
    • How does the group fit into the RFC process?
    • Not trying to sideline the RFC process
    • May not fit well into the day to day foundation acitivities
    • RFC's arent the great at follow and GSD
    • Jon wants to make sure he is not detached from Mobile
    • Jon will continue to be in Mobile Web working on tasks as neded but will involve the web team in using what this group produces
  • When should meetings be scheduled and how often?
    • Does this need to be a weekly meeting?
      • Play it by ear
      • What time? Early morning in SF
      • yeah probably a bit earlier for the remotes! +1
  • What are the group's short, mid and long term goals?
    • Trevor: "Every single team will be using the same technology to make the features that we make."
      • Brion: Mobile Apps will be a little different but still keep consistent where makes sense: use RL for styles, use a common templating system for customizable strings, etc
    • Making it easier for horizontal movement between teams by keeping things more consistent
    • Making it easier for newcomers to hack on our codebases by having simple, concise, common idioms for common tasks.
  • External stakeholder
    • Invite them as needed

Status check (10min max)

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MediaWiki theme for OOjs UI (soon)

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  • Trevor with Bartosz, pretty much done
  • Teams will be able to use OOUI (not off brand) next week
  • Server-side OOjs UI (weeks)
    • set of PHP classes that have the same API as JS classes (subset, naturally)
    • WIP [Trevor]
      • for next meeting: bringing items 'back to life' with JS after created statically?

Icon system (needs scope)

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  • Form standardisation (buttons, inputs, selects, checkboxes, radios etc.)
  • Mobile and Growth (and soon Flow) to be using same markup/css
  • Bartosz has done the early work for a Grunt task that can a pile of SVGs and a JSON config file to generate the colored svg and png renderings and the LESS for them
  • (how can we do this at runtime with ResourceLoader? figure this out in near future!)
    • It aligns with the Core team's wish to "librarize" components that are currently internal to MediaWiki and to have a build step that readies the source tree for deployment.
    • It's almost certainly impossible to do rasterizing SVG→PNG in RL, as that takes on the order of seconds. Build step needed? :(
      • i would recommend modifying SVGs in RL and rasterizing via 404 handler?
    • Summary: The generated built files should also be included in version control. MW should be runnable straight from git/tarball.

Templating (needs a decision)

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  • Brion -> putting this onto the agenda for the arch committee, let's make a decision soon
    • We would recommend mustache based language

Skin system (needs Trevors times)

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  • Trevor has ideas but no implentation yet
  • Expect to use server-side OOjs UI bits

OOUI template widget (days)

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Architectural issues (20min, or at least leave 10min)

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  • Icon generation + ResourceLoader
    • in general agreement that build step is best for now
      • include build artifacts in source control & tarballs (this is consistent with what we do on mobile apps!)
      • runtime conversion could be great for user scripts and gadgets but more infrastructure is needed to make that really feasible. revisit then?
    • but want to standardize that build step on npm+grunt
    • and have a consistent way jenkins can be configured to make sure things don't get out of sync

Planning (10min)

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Action items for coming week

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  • Reach out to Derk-Jan [Tomasz]
  • Schedule re-ocurring meeting [Tomasz]
  • Get some movement going on the template RfC, with input from frontend group usage needs [Brion]
    • Start thinking about and divide down the template vs live dynamic issues
  • Generate tentative Roadmap [Trevor]

Agenda for next meeting

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  • Templating language
    • Who should we include? Shahyar, Erik B, Kaldari
    • Review RFC
      • open questions on dynamicalization of statically-generated template output?
        • (does this relate to oojs ui server-side generation?)
  • Server-side OOUI
    • How to bind the generated HTML to the JavaScript objects.
      • (shared html templates that are recognised, KnockoutJS-like bind detection without rerendering the DOM)

Team members & advisors

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Implementors

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  • Trevor Parscal
  • Jon Robson
  • Bartosz Dziewoński
  • Timo Tijhof

Advisors

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  • Ori Livneh
  • Roan Kattouw
  • Brion Vibber

External stake holders

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  • Growth: Matt Flaschen
  • Flow: Shahyar Ghobadpour
  • Multimedia: Mark Holmquist
  • Design: Pau Giner
  • Mobile Apps: Brion Vibber (or Monte Hurd if Brion isn't advising)
  • Mobile Web: Jon Robson
  • VisualEditor: Trevor Parscal
  • Non-WMF skin authors