A step towards easier and faster matching of high-level components in page content could be to mark up elements like infoboxes or navboxes uniformly.

One idea to do this would be to leverage custom HTML5 element like <info-box> to wrap the transclusion content. Strawman syntax:

<info-box name="town" typeof="mw:Transclusion" data-mw="....">
  <div> Infobox content </div>
</info-box>

The <info-box> wrapper can be matched and styled like any other element. There is no default styling attached to it, so it should not affect the layout by default.

The tag syntax can also be matched efficiently at the string level, which makes it possible to efficiently rewrite content at the edge or in a service worker.

Implementation

To figure out the role of a component from a given template, we'd need to maintain a mapping. A possible place to maintain this could be templatedata. There might also be some room for heuristics, like categorizing all templates starting with infobox_ as an infobox.

Alternatively rendering <div data-template-name='infobox' data-params='{param:222}'></wikitemplate> would allow us more control - either use api to generate the HTML in a separate deferred request or completely rewrite the rendering engine. In mobile for instance we would like to collapse infoboxes...

Short summary of my thoughts from an irc conversation:

This goes back to the 'wikitext templates comprise a dsl' way of looking at it. infobox / navbox are just 2 pieces of that dsl used on certain kind of pages. Editors care about what pieces of the page represent what kind of content and how they can be represented in the language they use to author it. Specific sets of templates (alongwith the names of those) represent an abstraction about content on a page and they are enforced by editors and editorial policies. There are expectations about how / where they are used, formatting, etc.

Reading/editing clients might use this information for doing special things with them.

Mobile clients care about infoboxes or navboxes because that is what they have identified as important right now .. but, if they could know about sports tables or math formulae or whatever else .. they might be intersted in those too. So, I see infoboxes and navboxes as special cases of the general problem.

The primary thing to figure out is how do we get that information about infoboxes/navboxes/whatever-else form editors to parsoid/editing-clients/etc. How it is represented in (Parsoid) HTML is the simpler problem.

Alternatively rendering <div data-template-name='infobox' data-params='{param:222}'></wikitemplate> would allow us more control - either use api to generate the HTML in a separate deferred request or completely rewrite the rendering engine. In mobile for instance we would like to collapse infoboxes...

Yeah, the expansion can be stripped out where it makes sense. Parsoid would likely continue to emit most / all content in expanded form, but it would be easy and efficient to provide an alternate end point that offers the content with expansions stripped, or components moved out & served separately altogether. On the client (thinking ahead to T111588 and T106099), we can set up a registry of tag names to handlers, some of which would use the parameters provided in the element to request a server-side render, while others would just render things client-side.

The primary thing to figure out is how do we get that information about infoboxes/navboxes/whatever-else form editors to parsoid/editing-clients/etc. How it is represented in (Parsoid) HTML is the simpler problem.

I agree that maintaining a mapping of (say) templates to components is more complex than finding some markup for it. However, I still think that defining a decent DOM representation is important for usability and performance when working with such components. When working on a DOM, we should be able to match an infobox or navbox in a single DOM selector. When working at the bytestream level for high-volume applications with latency demands, having a safe way to extract page components at the string level is very valuable, too.

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In T105845#1683163, @GWicke wrote:

The primary thing to figure out is how do we get that information about infoboxes/navboxes/whatever-else form editors to parsoid/editing-clients/etc. How it is represented in (Parsoid) HTML is the simpler problem.

I agree that maintaining a mapping of (say) templates to components is more complex than finding some markup for it. However, I still think that defining a decent DOM representation is important for usability and performance when working with such components. When working on a DOM, we should be able to match an infobox or navbox in a single DOM selector. When working at the bytestream level for high-volume applications with latency demands, having a safe way to extract page components at the string level is very valuable, too.

To add to this, there are pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_cuisine where navboxes are positioned closer to where an infobox usually lives. There are also articles like this one that have navboxes both in the infobox position, and at the end of the article. This positioning seems sensible in a desktop context. We could make their expansion / following their custom placement optional with placeholder tags (as discussed in T105845#1650013) and serve them separately, but I think removing any trace of of their original position isn't really an option at this point.

Navcolumns are often used as a table of contents over articles, and their placement reflects that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science is a good example - the top-level article has a navcolumn, the direct children show the navcolumn with the respective section open, and the grandchildren use topic-specific navboxes instead. It's a very helpful pattern IMO when you are searching for something and going top-down in some subject - chances are you know the top topic name but not the subtopic name, so you will need to navigate from Science to Material science much more often than in the opposite direction, or from one grandchild to other. (That last one is what navboxes are for - you have finished reading or scrolling through the article and are looking for related topics.) Navcolumns deserve their own component, distinct from naxboxes, IMO.

There are also the articles which have multiple infoboxes. E.g. w:en:Mini has 9 distinct infoboxes. I'm not sure how widespread this pattern is, but I believe vehicle and media articles often use it? (when a subtopic isn't sufficiently notable, or sufficiently detailed, to be split into a separate page/stub, but does benefit from an infobox in its section).

There's also the pattern of a "single" infobox composed of multiple parts, e.g. the modular w:en:Template:Infobox animanga as used in e.g. w:en:Mushishi. A glance through the interwiki links, shows this pattern is used in many other languages. (Second example: w:en:Template:Infobox_ship_begin as used in e.g. USS Bang.)

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A somewhat related idea: T156876: Structured data side channel for wikitext

The idea's quite interesting but has fallen out of discussion some time ago. Shall we remove from the TechCom RFC list, or is there a party interested in taking it back on?

Dropping this off the RFC board, since it's not actionable. Adding to TechCom radar, since this seems relevant to platform evolution.