alistair3149
commented
10 months ago Congrats on the 1.0 release a few weeks ago 🎉 I have been tracking the progress of Codex closely and it has been delightful to hear the updates along the way. A design system has been long overdue in the MW ecosystem and hopefully that'll bring some order to the chaos with all the different UI.
We have somewhat implemented parts of the skin variables configuration a while ago but it has been a bit difficult to keep track of the changes in variables over the past few MW version because of how things are iterating rapidly in all UI front (e.g. Codex, Skin architecture, Desktop Improvements).
Because of various reasons, Citizen must maintain support for the latest LTS MediaWiki build (1.39.5). Is there any breaking changes introduced since 1.39.5? If there's any, then it won't be actionable for us until the next LTS version sadly.
On a somewhat unrelated note, how are your team planning to tackle non-WMF controlled UI? Third-party skins and extensions might adapt Codex, but is there any plans to make design tokens available on wiki for gadgets or even templates?
P.S. Love your overview chart btw
Background
Wikimedia Foundation's Design Systems Team has worked over the course of last two years to bring the learnings from all former user-interfaces and provide architecturally-sound solutions to gaps. Codex design tokens and their implementation in same nomenclature mediawiki.skin.variables.less are one of these newly provided ways. The skin variables are supported since v1.41.0.
One example of that profound solution is the new approach to breakpoint tokens, relying on
@min-width-and@max-widthspecific tokens per raw device class instead of@width-with its blurriness.The Solution
The skin authors should consider relying on the same nomenclature, as using the mediawiki.skin.variables.less functionality would magically make extensions adapt to the skin.
The Alternatives
You continue with the Citizen Skins pure copy of variables. Which is less work upfront, but you'd be leaving out to have a more custom experience for your users.