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 extensions and several gadgets that rely on jQuery.ui

OOUI came into place 2013. VisualEditor, following modern practices at time

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.