Re: Smoothing the edges by example (was pilot case?)

I'd like to add a few things that I feel are important for getting more
adoption. You could call these goals too I suppose.

1. We need a better story for the average developer/engineer who is having
trouble due to browser limitations but has a great idea. We need to
educate this person that they should prollyfill.

2. For these average developers/engineers we need a very clear and very
easy project template for their great idea. This template includes
fixtures for tests, examples for documentation and all of the normally
expected OSS artifacts. Yeoman generators are a good idea here. I believe
that Chef has a great pattern for cookbooks and that we could provide a
similar framework for developers to use in building their prollyfill.

3. These developers/engineers should get this great idea published into
the prollyfill registry for free. The said project template should
automate the registration for them (I'm thinking of Ruby gems like
Jeweler). 

4. There needs to be an "engine" that runs the prollyfills that developers
need not worry about. The responsibility of the engine is to execute the
prollyfill for which ever target the developer has (JavaScript, CSS or
HTML).

Now I've assumed many things in those steps [engine, registry, project
template, code generators] but I think those are the things we fill in.
Having these things in place makes the work of getting it in front of the
right WG much easier and with some organization. I would assume most WG
would be displeased if all the great ideas came at them in varying forms
but are all called prollyfills.

It's my opinion that we could collect tons of experience and we can do the
research to smooth out the edges - but it would all be for not if the
above things don't get better and easier.



On 5/8/13 9:05 AM, "Marcos Caceres" <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

>
>
>On Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at 4:36 PM, François REMY wrote:
>
>> > Documenting the experiences would be
>> > of great value to the community, we
>> > just need to do it (once we get enough
>> > experience).
>> >  
>> > I have experience from prollyfilling a
>> > few APIs with the WebIDL projectŠ and I
>> > plan to do a few more in the near future
>> > (for SysApps).
>> >  
>> > I'm happy brand that work as having come
>> > from this CG.
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> Nice. I agree that experience is a prerequirement on that front. Brian
>>has a good and growing experience on prollyfilling CSS from which we can
>>build upon, too.
>Absolutely. The problem is that we have no criteria to measure if what we
>are doing is any good or not. Mechanical tools aside (linting or
>whatever), knowing if the quality of what we are doing is any good
>requires independent evaluation from our peers (who may or may not know
>what they are talking about). Best we can do right now is share our
>experience and pain points - and hopefully users of our tools can do the
>same.  
>
>Alternative is to look at prollyfills that are used in the wild by large
>number of developers (e.g., parts of JQuery, picturefill, etc.) and see
>if we can spot some patterns (and come up with reasons as to why we think
>those are good patterns). And evaluate where the developer of the
>prollyfill has struggled because of platform limitations. If we find
>those limitations, we can then take them to various WGs and say: "see!
>people are trying to do X and they can't - we need primitive X". For
>example:
>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5136727/manually-artificially-throwing-
>a-domexception-with-javascript
>
>We can also present these patterns to, for example,
>public-script-coord/TC39 and ask them if they are idiomatic uses of
>javascript.  
>    
>With WebIDL.js, we have basically 0 users right now (as it's not done and
>not yet practical to use in a project). I'm trying to grow that to a
>handful with specs I am prototyping, but so far it has only been me doing
>the prototyping.  
>
>Brian can probably reveal his usage stats for Hitch.
>
>Hope that makes some senseŠ
>
>--  
>Marcos Caceres
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 8 May 2013 17:06:40 UTC