Technical TODO list

[brian-learningpool]

This is a placeholder ticket for items which could be considered technical debt. @oliverfoster and @moloko have some ideas for re-work. Please add the details below, guys.

[oliverfoster]

1. add es6 support - using a transpiler (?) https://babeljs.io/ (need point 2 before this is possible)
2. remove core require mappings "coreJS" "coreViews" etc (enhancement/929: remove core require mappings "coreJS" "coreViews" #930)
3. rework event cascades from component to course so that they trigger in order rather than in reverse (bugfix/927: reverse order of completion events #928)
4. add questionModel (Move towards true MVC #925) and component models, move model behaviour from views into relevant models
5. move core theme dependencies from theme to core
6. add global text support to framework !!update templates to match!!
7. move scrolling body from html+body tags to nested psuedo html+body tags (for ios moodle iframe scrolling support). remove scrollto library and replace with velocity scrolling.
8. split libraries folder into "compiled libraries" and "static libraries" [scriptloader, jquery, modernizer, json2, console] are all static, [underscore, backbone, handlebars, scrollto, velocity, jquery.a11y, etc] are all compiled.
9. backbone alternatives (http://marionettejs.com/) (need point 4 before it's worth considering this)
10. ui component alternatives (https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/)

[moloko]

TypeScript??

[moloko]

it would certainly be interesting to use something like Polymer to handle UI stuff as many UI elements are shared across different plugins - e.g. the slider UI is used in contrib-slider, confidenceSlider and linkedConfidenceSlider - crazy duplication. Separating these out would allow all three components to take advantage of the same UI component.

(although in this particular instance if we were to drop support for IE8 & 9 we could just use the HTML5 'range' input type)

[moloko]

If not TypeScript, support for Flow would be great

[moloko]

Possible alternatives for MediaElement:

• PayPal accessible player
• AblePlayer
• Plyr (more)

Need to do a feature-comparison table to work out which is best.

[davidpesce]

+1 for es6 modules and typescript!

[gorhgorh]

+1 for es6 + flow :)

[moloko]

if we do drop support for IE8 in a future version, we should consider starting to use some of the new HTML semantic elements like <header> and <nav> where appropriate

[corymayfield]

@moloko There's no reason why we can't use semantic elements like <header> and <nav> now. For IE8 support which a lot of people (especially corporates in AUS) just upgraded too from IE6, you can use a polyfill such as html5shiv (https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv) - which Bootstrap 3.3.6 uses to support IE8 compatibility.