Wikimedia Scripts/Policy draft

This is a Policy Draft for the proposed project Wikimedia Scripts.

Best practices

All the advice presented here is not mandatory, but it's highly recommended to follow it.

Libraries

Use jQuery and the other available JavaScript libraries when suitable. Use OOjs UI (see documentation) as a standard User experience.

• HTML5 <progress> is allowed

  alternative: jQueryUI progressbar

• HTML5 <input type="range"> is allowed

  alternative: jQueryUI slider

• HTML5 <datalist> is allowed

  alternatives:

  • jQuery.suggestions
  • jQueryUI autocomplete

• JavaScript alert, prompt, and confirm are allowed,

  also: consider using mw.notify for less intrusive messages

• cookies for data that doesn't have to be sent to the server should be avoided

  but OO.ui.Dialog is recommended instead

  Tip: AlertStyler will provide jQuery.alert, jQuery.prompt and jQuery.confirm

  alternatives:

  • jQueryUI dialog
  • jQuery.jStorage (preferred for compatibility reasons)
  • HTML5 WebStorage (LocalStorage/SessionStorage)

  if it's necessary to use cookies, use jQuery.cookie

AJAX

Use Ajax when possible: it's easier to do a POST request (with jQuery) than storing somewhere the action to make and then manipulate the edit page. It's very inadvisable to do it, unless some strong interaction or control by the user is needed.

Usually, all actions can be made directly from the page: for example, a script to help voting Quality Images on Commons, ...

Intelligent Guess

Use 'Artificial Intelligence' to guess as many things as possible without the user's interaction: for example, a voting script would check automatically if every user has the requirements, and in case of negative result, provide the user a simple way to 'rollback' the vote.

Presentation

Give your code the best indentation possible, according to the policies. It's not useful to compress and 'minify' the source code by any means, since this is made by ResourceLoader in production.