Kaldari, RobLa, Trevor and I met yesterday to discuss the template RFC [1].
Sadly Gabriel was not present. Kaldari and I are very concerned that
we are blocking standardisation of a generic template library on the
completion of Knockoff.
Trevor, Kaldari and I identified that two things need to happen for
the templating solution that currently lives in Mantle [2] to core:
1) We need some JavaScript API for using templates (in current form
all we have is a standard way to ship templates from the server to the
frontend). Trevor is working on a template widget for oojs which will
make this possible
2) We need a standard template language
3) Better namespacing for templates - we identified that we will need
to find better ways of uniquely identifying templates [3].
We questioned whether point 2 should be blocking, as we recognised
that even if we decide to standardise on Knockoff in future, it should
be trivial to write a script that converts Hogan/Handlebars template
language to Knockoff. The Mantle ResourceLoader module in current form
is template agnostic and currently works with both Hogan and
Handlebars, so in theory should make it easy to transition from one
template language to another.
On this basis, I think the next step would be for the oojs development
team to get a template widget up that can be used by Mantle.
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Mantle
[3]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69916