Last modified: 2013-12-25 21:39:05 UTC
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox The current input implementation for ApiSandbox is a big form with drop-down menus and checkboxes and text input areas. This is a fine approach, but the form has some drawbacks: (1) the form itself is terribly large and overwhelming; (2) sometimes URL parameters can be weird and accept multiple input values separated by a pipe ("|"), which can be awkward with certain interface elements such as drop-down menus (cf. bug 38787); and (3) the current input method separates the user from the API in kind of a weird way. By point 3, I mean that I think there's something to be said for making the user type in some of these values (as opposed to using drop-down menus and checkboxes and such) in order to "manually" build a URL string. Compare with tools such as <http://www.codecademy.com>, which take a similar approach. I'm proposing a separate (an additional) input method for ApiSandbox that looks like a large textarea, but comes with keyword suggestions (similar to Gerrit's search bar) and tab-completion. It's less hand-holding, of course, but I suppose it depends who the primary audience of ApiSandbox is or what its primary purpose is. To me, if it's aimed at developers, coders, et al., I think making them type things out is better for learning and understanding the MediaWiki API. Plus this textarea approach is much more flexible, of course, allowing users to more easily create pipe-separated values and such. Feel free to wontfix this bug if you think it's a stupid or terrible idea, otherwise it seems like a reasonable enhancement request to me.
I'm not going to implement it as one of main reasons for existence of ApiSandbox are discovery and learning - something that is explicitly absent from this proposal.
