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Remove mobileview API call for main page
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Description

Currently the main page uses a call to the mobileview API to get content.
This should not be necessary.

The mobileview API does various things, in particular it runs the MobileFormatter which applies various main page special casing rules that are in the process of being deprecated (see T32405)

We can either wait for that to be completed or consider applying the transformations locally in the MCS.

Open questions

  • How prominent is the main page in apps? Is it acceptable to not apply transformations to help speed up T32405?

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Event Timeline

The iOS app doesn't appear to have a Main Page card in the feed; only the Android app does. Not presenting a Main Page card makes more sense to me, since the feed mostly contains the same content as the Main Page, but presented in a more compelling way for mobile.

If the Android app were to do away with the Main Page feed card, making the Main Page reachable only specifically by search, then IMHO it would be acceptable just to present the Main Page from Parsoid (allowing us to get rid of this special-case code), but of course that's really a call for the product owners to make.

IMHO it would be acceptable just to present the Main Page from Parsoid (allowing us to get rid of this special-case code), but of course that's really a call for the product owners to make.

Actually, I just tested this in the Android app with Parsoid's rendering of the enwiki Main Page and it's really pretty bad.

That wouldn't surprise me. Parsoid has no concept of the mobileformatter and I'm guessing the mobile content service doesn't optimise the page as android do not render the main page at all?

TemplateStyles could help however...

@Mholloway screenshots or it didn't happen. ;)

You got it ;)

Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 9.10.23 PM.png (743×358 px, 152 KB)
Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 9.10.38 PM.png (747×358 px, 104 KB)
Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 9.11.31 PM.png (749×356 px, 160 KB)
Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 9.10.53 PM.png (752×360 px, 156 KB)

We're happy to remove the call to mobileview as soon as some of the criteria for T32405: [EPIC] MobileFrontend extension should stop special-casing main page is met.

  • Community engagement - T138622. All mobile main pages need to be updated to not use the mf- prefix using only the nomobile where necessary. See wikidata.org for a good example.
  • All mobile main pages should stop using tables immediately for layouts

As soon as:

  • Remove special casing code from MobileFrontend

...starts happening, and the main pages are adapted by editors to work better on small viewports, we will swiftly stop relying on the special casing too.

I don't think the main page is extremely accessible on apps, but in any case we don't want to show broken main pages if a user gets there. I'll make this task depend on T32405 to keep track of its status.

We're happy to remove the call to mobileview as soon as some of the criteria for T32405: [EPIC] MobileFrontend extension should stop special-casing main page is met.

No problem. I see this as along term deprecation. I'd like to mark it as deprecated (T210808), but that deprecation can take say 2 years if we need it to! I believe there are parts of mobileview that can be deprecated much sooner. I'd love to have your blessing to kick this off. The last thing we want is new users.

I'm seeing promising changes since TemplateStyles - many wikis are slowly transitioning, so I think some community engagement is already happening here.

Nice @Jdlrobson. +1 from us then, it seems like the other tasks take into consideration the "fixing" of the problems so we agree with you about this 👍

This parameter has zero effect now. Declining given the original plan to deprecate this here: T186627