Last modified: 2013-09-14 17:13:34 UTC
There was some talk about a better aproach to rendering and caching at LJ in january, see <http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/2943.html>. I would like to repeat the suggestions I made there, so maybe someone can have a look at implementing them some times. Its basically about using redirects and CSS to allow all users to be served the exact same HTML code. So here goes: * The NewTalk-Natification could be implemented by CSS: It would always be present in the HTML, but invisible (set to "display:none"). An additional small CSS could be included that is always pulled from the apache and just makes that message visible when needed. * innocence suggested in the IRC to handle "My Talk" / "My Contributeion" etc by pointing them at a special page that automatically redirects to the correct user page. That sounds good... * The only problem remaining is "red links". This could be solved using css and redirects too: first, let the links point to the normal URL, without the "edit" action - when a nonexistant page is visited, simply redirect to the edit-page. That would be a change in semantics, but it would be worth it i think. * The coloring of dead links could be done via a separate css file that is not cached and always created dynamically by the apaches. This CSS would need to define a separate class for every link-target, maybe named along the lines of "link_to_Foobar" - that'S not very elegant, but it should work, i think... So i belive it *is* possible to use full HTML caching *all* requests. What do you think?
I think that this is throwing away a lot of accessibility and semantic clarity, which in the modern age of MediaWiki we would not accept. Including the newmessages bar on every pageview for all text browsers is pretty much a nonstarter in 2011. WONTFIX/INVALID?
I agree that we should WONTFIX this for various reasons (most obvious ones already pointed out).