Re: A followup/writeup on our Monday discussions (was Re: Continuing discussion on Polyfills)

I've tried to reduce this thing to the crux of its matter so sorry in
advance if this is simplistic.  

If you consider it a (speculative) polyfill, you don't even have to deal
with it and can remove it from the principles. It's indeed up to authors
to figure it out. This is what has been expected on the web platform for
a very long time, this is web as usual (progressive enhancement). It's
also their responsibility to make it play nice when the feature is
supported. 

If you consider it anything else than a polyfill, you've got something
extra to spec (e.g. fallback). But it doesn't prevent authors from
trying to polyfill if it can be polyfilled and what you end up creating
presuppose the spec is implemented to manage the mechanism. It is your
responsibility to design something so that it can play nice in specific
apps. It can be relatively simple (entry page specific apps don't
display) or somewhat complex. 

The current wording is really difficult to implement into the "daily web
conceptual model", at least to me and a few others I could discuss with
very quickly. I really can't tell whether it's about polyfills or
anything else. Whichever its name, the description is confusing. It
smells like a polyfill, it sounds like a polyfill, it looks like a
polyfill, it has all the characteristics of a polyfill, but then there's
this part 

"The reference to the WP Script should be clearly identified as such
(e.g., via a profile in the media type?)" 

And now I'm not even sure I know what a polyfill is, while I'm using
them regularly and even used one a fe hours ago, and my level of anxiety
has really gone through the roof. 

BTW, that kind of confusion already happened for "landing page" (now
entry page?) last year, which is conceptually very different in the web
context. It was super difficult to understand the related github issue
was all about because of that. Really, I gave up in the middle of the
issue because "landing page" has meant something completely different to
me for the last 5 years.  

Best,  

Jiminy 

Le 07.02.2018 15:46, Ivan Herman a écrit :

> On 7 Feb 2018, at 15:35, Romain <rdeltour@gmail.com> wrote: 
> 
> On 7 Feb 2018, at 14:37, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote: 
> The term "WP Script", in my mind, is just a name I use to designate a script whose goal is to implement a minimal viable publication mode. And to differentiate it from another script that may do some publication specific interaction like visualizing some research data. 
> My understanding is that such a beast can be called "speculative polyfill". But I may be wrong :-)

I could use the term "reading system script", but that would lead to
bigger wars! :-) 

Again, an idea for a better term, that does not necessarily prescribes
that this a polyfill, would be welcome 

Ivan 

> Romain.

----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Publishing@W3C Technical Lead 
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153 
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704