Talk:VisualEditor/Roadmap/Archive 1

DL

What are DLs? "Definition lists"? Is that formatting so used? Most style rules on our projects limit it a lot, as far as I know. --Nemo 05:33, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes; they occur an awful lot (especially often as a minor heading), though their use as originally intended in HTML is less frequent on our projects, yes. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 04:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. Too bad we can't deprecate their abuse as pseudo-headers (MS Word habits). --Nemo 06:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Even if we deprecate it, VisualEditor has to work on the entire corpus of Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc. - we can't just give up and walk away from ugly syntax. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Talk pages

Someone says that the visual editor won't be enabled on talk pages. Is this correct? They're still one out of three points in "Future work", "MediaWiki integration", "Core" in this roadmap, so I'm quite confused. Thanks, Nemo 22:57, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Talk pages are indeed not in scope for VisualEditor right now. Sorry for the confusion. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Translate-able content

I noticed it's one of the blocked items. Thanks, I think that spelling such things out clearly is very helpful. The "really blocking" part is the interaction between the parser and translate tags, I think that could be figured out by parsoid people and Niklas with some joint thinking and someone working on the details. Maybe GSoC is the opportunity, Mentorship programs/Possible projects#VisualEditor plugins has 3 VE mentors but zero project ideas. One co-mentor from parsoid and optionally one for the frontend (Roan or Timo) would probably be enough to move forward with Visual translation: Integration of page translation with Visual Editor. --Nemo 08:23, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Thanks. I'm not sure GSoC would be an appropriate venue for this, given that we're talking about complete re-architecting of how the Translate extension works (unless I've mis-understood the technical issues). I agree that the "and make it nice to edit in VE" part probably would work well as a GSoC project, but it's entirely blocked on this major piece of work which I do not believe is in anyone's plans right now, sadly. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

It would not be a major re-architecturing of Translate (patch already exists), it is mostly about that the wikitext parser does not allow <translate> to do what I want currently. It could need significant changes in the wikitext parser though, and we all know how parser is (hint: complex). --Nikerabbit (talk) 18:33, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

References tag

Sorry for starting another section... Oh well. I love the project of extending the references syntax, those reflist templates are very ugly. On the other hand existing syntax like groups is used very little. I guess that's what a visual editor is being made for ;) but do you plan to support the full references tag syntax or just the most used parts like columns and font size? --Nemo 08:51, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: What do you mean by "full"? <references /> was never designed to take any parameters other than group. All the {{reflist}}s are doing is hacking the references with some CSS over-rides using inline styles – but because this is a generic power, it can do pretty much anything. For example, we probably don't want to support a count of columns, because that's fundamentally anti-Web (it assumes readability of the user's screen size, which isn't true e.g. for mobile or limited-vision users). I think the parameters we should support (beyond groups) are:

• list-style-type
• column-width

… and we should have some changes to the default class (like font-size: 90%;) that can be over-ridden by each wiki if desired. Does that make sense? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Sorry. By "full" I mean group, in addition to whatever other syntax you plan to add to it. :) Because I assume you'll be supporting what you think worth adding to Cite, and I fully agree with the idea of extending the syntax in that way: I've always hated reflists columns and all the other tricks, for the reasons you say. --Nemo 19:22, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: We already support group in both references and reference lists, and have done since May. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 04:02, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Citations

Perhaps this is the right placed to dicuss Citations -- "Discussions with Wikidata about structured reference storage"? (I asked about this [1] at Talk:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog but was told that was "off-topic" for that oage without a hint as to the correct place to pursue the discussion [2]). So, is a unified database of references across projects, presumably through Wikidata, a logical next step? Would it be open source and open format? Deltahedron (talk) 16:18, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean m:Wikicite? --Nemo 18:05, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't know, that's why I'm asking! Thanks for the reference. Deltahedron (talk) 18:12, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

@Deltahedron: The link from Nemo bis is roughly right, but not exactly specific, and this is not really VisualEditor-specific; I don't think anyone from the Wikidata team or the wider community involved the discussions have yet written up musings on where they think it will go, sorry. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Difference between columns on roadmap

What does "VisualEditor-core" and "VisualEditor-MediaWiki" mean? How are they different? Ckoerner (talk) 14:26, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

I think this was recently mentioned at enwiki? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:59, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

@User:Jdforrester (WMF), worth explaining on the page? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:39, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

@Ckoerner and Elitre (WMF): Better? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Thumbs up. Thank you Ckoerner (talk) 15:04, 20 May 2015 (UTC)