Re: Rethinking our layout

[Colin Walters <walters redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 02:08 +0200, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Hi folks, came across this scary little project on Havoc's blog. :)

Heh.  Good to have you here Brion, a grep of my Mediawiki source tree
tells me you're a good person to talk to :)

One thing I might mention first is that our current Mediawiki
integration is a relatively recent change of direction; originally the
codebase was standalone, and then we decided it would work well in a
wiki, and then we chose Mediawiki.  So some technical facets of the
codebase would probably be different had we chosen the wiki-embedding
from the start (and in particular had we focused on Mediawiki).

> You might want to take a look at the 'live preview' code in the current
> EditPage.php (this is off by default as it was experimental and had some
> problems with compatibility). It provides a primitive
> XmlHttpRequest-able wikitext rendering so previews can be done without
> leaving the page.

That's pretty cool, although I think it's not quite the same thing as
the "live section" plans.  For example, I was just planning to suck the
section content into a regular Yarrr live comment; it wouldn't be
rendered as HTML until it was readded to the wiki.  So it seems to me
the difficulties you mentioned with parsing HTML wouldn't apply, no?  Or
am I missing something here?

In other words the goal of the live section is to make it easier for
other people to collaborate on editing a particular section; getting a
better preview is kind of orthogonal.

On a more general technical front, we have been meaning to take a closer
look at the Mediawiki development tree; for example, Jonathan mentioned
that you guys have been working on an XML-RPC interface.

And even more general, I'm curious if you have any higher-level comments
about the existing ☠ implementation, our goals, etc?