Re: Colloquial Tidbits

Hi Sean,  
This is a good list…. some comments…  

On Friday, 16 September 2011 at 03:56, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> Now that everybody should be subscribed to the lists, I'd like to
> check that everybody is receiving email properly and start things
> moving along.
>  
> There are lots of interesting things I'd like to work on, and I hope
> that everybody else will add to the pool. My general plan for going
> forward at the moment is to outline some of the ideas on the lists and
> wiki, and when we've settled some basics recruit some more people from
> neighbouring communities such as the HTML lists and so on.
>  
> Just a few ideas to be thinking about at this stage:
>  
> * Quality assurance scenarios. How do people actually check their
> websites? The scope here is people who write the HTML / CSS /
> JavaScript themselves, so people who are pumping material through a
> CMS don't count.  
Those still seem like still valid cases, they just make those templates available as a platform to scale. There is good information in all the Wordpress, Drupal, etc. templates out there.  

I guess what would also be interesting here is Q) what percentage of the Web is using a custom CMS vs … um, static pages?… actually, this is a bit weird, as anything on a that serves content is a CMS (e.g., php, rails, coldfusion, node, etc. are platforms that manage content).  

> Will probably involve spending lots of time in the
> DOM inspector. I'm constantly having to draw in boxes to check why the
> box model isn't quite working as I think it should be.
Would we be talking one on one to developers? Do you see this being a survey?  

> * Cross browser polyfills. Ways of making the future web work through
> scripting, usually. I even made a seamless iframe one, by making the
> old browsers (which is to say, current browsers, since seamless
> iframes aren't supported anywhere yet) render a button instead. Is
> standardisation taking a back seat now that we have more powerful
> mechanisms in which to build new technologies? You don't have to make
> a standards organisation to create CoffeeScript for example; but
> compare Dash. Er, Dart...
There is research in the general standardisation literature around this. That is, the explosion of consortia in the last century and towards the movement of towards informal consortia like the WHATWG, common.js, etc.… naturally, the Web enables these communities to form very easily. So, I don't know that the question is correct… standardisation is increasing, but not in traditional settings (e.g., the W3C). Obviously, the W3C has recognised this, which is why these community groups were created (to fold groups back into the W3C, while providing the tools that enables standardisation easily… such as IRC, this mailing list, the Website, etc.).  
> * Fashions. The web ten years ago was very different to the web now
> not just because it had fewer users, but also because the technologies
> have changed dramatically.
Can you give some examples of what you are thinking here? is it hardware or software? I guess both?  
>  A lot of content now gets pushed through
> CMSes. Can we predict whether this trend will rise or fall over the
> next ten years? What trends might be coming up in the next ten years
> with respect to content? Could we have predicted CMSes ten years ago?
We might need a definition of CMS… like I implied above, I see PHP, for instance, as a CMS on which other CMSs can be built. That is, although you can do other things with PHP, it's seems to be heavily geared towards the management and distribution of content on the Web.  
> Material sent to public-colloquial-contrib automatically gets license
> cleared so that we can use it on the wiki and in any specifications
> that we produce, though I'm not exactly sure what kind of
> specifications a descriptivist research group would be making.
I guess we could make recommendation around trends; where it's clearly obvious where something would benefit from standardisation because a large segment is doing it that way. Or at least help inform the work of other groups.

Kind regards,
Marcos

Received on Friday, 16 September 2011 04:32:36 UTC