User talk:Jdlrobson/Musings about the future of MobileFrontend
Nice writeup[edit]
Nice writeup. I think if skins were merged into one responsive skin it would be important that the responsive part also includes the notion of optimized network transfer. Bloated stylesheets and markup probably don't make sense on smaller form factor devices, whereas larger and more powerful devices, often on faster connections, don't necessarily suffer as much from such things.
One fringe benefit of one skin to rule them all would be fewer redirects. I guess on Wikimedia properties we still have to fragment the cache, although in third party installs without a fronting cache maybe it's all origin side so it's not a big deal.
From a tactical standpoint, we'd need to queue any new extensions or major introductions to existing skins / core for security review along with quarterly review. Obviously, tough tradeoffs to be made for more immediately directly providing user value versus a more protracted, indirect, but eventual improvement of user value (and architectural cohesion, which I think means more developer happiness in the long run). In any case, the current trajectory of writing stuff in a more generic fashion first seems to be a pretty good step.