User:JHernandez (WMF)/MFnext

There are 3 main layers to consider for the future of the mobile website (Opinions. Everybody has them).

Consuming content from REST services

Moving content consumption to REST services so that we can

• share endpoints and efforts between platforms and features
• remove the tech debt source in ApiMobileView and MobileFormatter
• provide better features and interactions in the client (enabled by being able to use APIs from it)

Improve front-end tooling and stack

To be more effective and deliver a better product introducing a build step so that we can use modern tooling that will allow us to

• test more easily and in an isolated way
• user latest well maintained tools (like lessc or uglifyjs) instead of the unofficial Php versions
• serve source maps in development and production for better debuggability
• use uglifyjs to minify our sources and deliver ~30% smaller payloads to our users
• pre-compile assets like templates, pre-process assets like images
• use a module system and automatically bundle sources instead of having to manually update the dependencies between files manually

Provide a progressive webapp experience

In order to provide a faster and better product, moving the mobile website to be a website that progresses to a web application and leverages service workers for caching and an offline experience.

• solve the cached vs cached assets issue by versioning served frontend assets
• deliver a fast cached experience on first visit for both anon and logged in users
• deliver an app like UX experience (better UI, fluid interactions, no blank loading pages) after the initial load
• instant load on second visit
• provide an offline web experience (pending research results)