Talk:Parser 2011/Potential projects

Application specialization

Ether pad and similar projects' implementation of chat + collaborative editing sucks. The chat is rarely or never used because it is laggy, and either eats editing screen real estate or is too tiny to be useful. This is especially true on netbooks/mobile devices. Look at how many conversations happen within the document. And this is without the additional overhead of everything else in MW's js, operating within a browser.

Rather than trying to pull everything into the MW UX, perhaps you could subscribe to the "do one thing very well" model at least a little bit and instead integrate multiple specialized softwares, e.g. use irc://irc.wikipedia.org/en:Article_title if the user has a default IRC client, else open a pop-up window with an webclient to that channel.

Similarly, phpBB can be used as an engine within MW. Each page can be a forum, with threads displayed within it. This can already be pulled into pages (PhpBB ShowTopic, PHPBB ShowForum, etc.) phpBB is a focused forum CMS, and can be leveraged to avoid wheel re-invention. As long as WMF avoids the "it must works special for WMF" delusion, you can have the functionality without the maintenance.

If the point is abstraction, why are we considering complexifying? - Amgine 20:52, 8 February 2012 (UTC)