event report: W3C TPAC
Paul Irish
Hey all, Yehuda and I just attended the TPAC where standards folks meet face to face and work on evolving the web.
We had very productive discussions about the web platform with browser engineers and specification folks, but we were primarily there to present a session: What jQuery (& JavaScript Developers) Want from Web Standards.
Slides: http://bit.ly/jqueryw3cpres
Minutes: http://www.w3.org/2011/11/02-jquery-minutes.html
Summary of session:
Our recommendation: Get feature detects in specs
Our recommendation: keeping use cases written in prose in specs to help identify and communicate potential of features
We mentioned some more granular issues like: appcache, bubbling events, getElementsFromPoint, classList, docFragment.innerHTML, simulating keyboard/click events.
Lastly, we opened a discussion around finding routes for involvement in standards for developers
- mailing lists are scary. people afraid of looking stupid
- test cases are written in the language of web developers. they should review them, write new ones, assist specs with tests
- jonas sicking: "writing tests takes half the time of writing the feature. if the tests are already written, i can implement double the features."
- everyone agreed script library authors had significantly useful input
Results:
As a result of the session, we created a Community Group for library authors to interact with browsers & spec editors http://www.w3.org/community/groups/#scriptlib
We will work also with Robin Berjon to get a Best Practices document about feature detection involved in specs
And we had some great followup with moz, webkit, and IE engineers about some of the features we mentioned. (fragment.innerHTML is getting positive feedback on public-webapps, as we speak!)
Feedback:
- sgalineau Sylvain Galineau The
#tpac breakout on what jQuery needs from standards by@paul_irish was awesome and overdue. Must find a way to make this more regular. - robinberjon Robin Berjon Best
#tpac session today was@wycats and@paul_irish doing the#occupyW3C thing. Lots of good can come of this. - anssik Anssi Kostiainen Participating
@paul_irish and@wycats facilitated breakout session about what jQuery developers want from web standards here at#W3C#TPAC.
Anyway.. was a great event and we had excellent momentum in this area. We'll have more details soon about the community group and other bits.
Paul
Robin Berjon
On Nov 4, 2011, at 15:26 , Paul Irish wrote:
> We had very productive discussions about the web platform with browser engineers and specification folks, but we were primarily there to present a session: What jQuery (& JavaScript Developers) Want from Web Standards.
First and foremost, thanks a lot for making this session happen. I personally thought that it was very useful and helped put a lot of momentum behind the developer-friendly agenda.
> As a result of the session, we created a Community Group for library authors to interact with browsers & spec editors http://www.w3.org/community/groups/#scriptlib
>
> We will work also with Robin Berjon to get a Best Practices document about feature detection involved in specs
The first step there is getting agreement to use GitHub to develop this document. W3C normally uses its own hg setup for this (or, historically, CVS) so this is a change. There are various (good) reasons why such a change can be scary (which mostly have to do with ensuring that W3C remain Royalty-Free) but I think I've made a good case that we could experiment precisely with this document and see how that goes: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/2011OctDec/0009.html. Feedback on this idea is very welcome.
Once I have a go on this I'll start gathering input (and hopefully pull requests) for it. There's a lot of interest in documenting how to write good Web APIs so I'm thinking that the scope of the document ought to be "Writing Web APIs Cookbook". Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Concerning the Script Library Community Group (http://www.w3.org/community/scriptlib/), do you have any specific plans? The keys are yours, really :) There's a mailing list, blog, wiki, and a few assorted things that can be used there. Do you want to transition this list over there to enlarge the reach to library communities other than jQuery? At any rate I was thinking of having the discussion about the aforementioned document there. All thoughts on how you'd like to use the CG are welcome, we just need to figure out how to make it most useful.
And thanks again!
--
Robin Berjon
Robineko (http://robineko.com/)
Twitter: @robinberjon
Robin Berjon
As discussed yesterday, and having heard a lot of very strong support for using GitHub, I've now put this up as the "Web API Design Cookbook". I've taken a few ideas I heard, fleshed out one of the sections as an example. Everything in there is open to change, don't be afraid of the W3C logo :) It's up at:
http://scriptlib-cg.github.com/api-design-cookbook/
The source is on GitHub (it will also be synced to the W3C server where the previous skeleton was stored):
https://github.com/scriptlib-cg/api-design-cookbook
Everyone is welcome to contribute (either recipes or empty sections calling out the need for one). This belongs to an organisation account (for the Script Library CG), and I'm happy to add people to the organisation.