User:Volker E. (WMF)/sandbox/History of user-interface libraries

History of user-interface libraries in MediaWiki
There have been several attempts for providing consistent user-interface features over the 20 years of MediaWiki (MW).

The first “skin”, Monobook was added in MW 1.3, and featured a first technical design document.

All of the following “libraries” were either part of MediaWiki core itself or deployed together.

MediaWiki UI was initialized by Design team, mainly caring only about simple form elements with a focus on MobileFrontend in 2014. Its CSS class-based approach hit limitations with higher complex UI components (f.e. date picker) and also faced critique for providing abilities for misuse in gadgets/user scripts which would provide more user experience and consistency problems in the long run.

jQuery since 2011 and MW 1.16, jquery.ui, which was deprecated in 1.29 for OOUI. There's still a few wider-used extensions like 2010 wikitext editor and several gadgets that rely on jQuery.ui

OOUI has originally been designed around a specific product, VisualEditor in 2013, following modern coding practices at time with its object-oriented JavaScript paradigm. It then became the default library at the Foundation. Later the Product Design team has been assigned to generalize it further and make OOUI follow the Design Style Guide as much as possible.

Through all of this the Web evolved. And around 2020 with new technology and architecture for modern Web requirements, Foundation set out to build a new user-interface library based on Vue.js. As project and scope got defined the Desktop Improvements project work on Vector 2022 with an important component, TypeaheadSearch. This time the project – Codex – has received support by the Foundation to be built as design-first, cross-product design system toolkit.

WVUI based on decision of Foundation to use Vue.js and

Codex outcome of several considerations and joint agreement at the Vue.js Developer Summit_2021 organized by the Design Systems Team.