[mhd]

> We will (re)examine some of the reasons behind this architectural choice in a future blog post, but the loose coupling of Parsoid and the MediaWiki core allowed rapid iteration in what was originally a highly experimental effort to support visual editing.

I'd really like to read that. The decision to have this parser as a completely separate component is the main reason why a lot of local MediaWiki installations completely avoided having a visual editor -- which in turn probably created lots of missing hours and/or missing documentation because WikiCreole ain't exactly a thing of beauty or something that's used in other places (as opposed to Markdown, which is an ugly beast, too, but at least the ugly beast you know).

You need a heavy JS frontend for a visual editor anyway, so why not do it client-side?

Having to deploy a separate component, probably in an environment that's not used at all is pretty much the worst choice possible. Yes, I'm aware, you readers here probably do all kinds of hip docker/keights setups where yet another node microservice ain't nothing special (and should've been rewritten in Rust, of course), but a wiki is something on a different level of ubiquity.