Re: WebPlatform Browser Support Info

On Friday, October 18, 2013 at 1:47 PM, HTML5test wrote:
> On Oct 18, 2013, at 12:48, Ronald Mansveld <ronald@ronaldmansveld.nl (mailto:ronald@ronaldmansveld.nl)> wrote:
> > Tobie Langel schreef op 2013-10-18 11:27:
> > > On Friday, October 18, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Niels Leenheer wrote:
> > > > On Oct 18, 2013, at 12:23 AM, Tobie Langel <tobie@w3.org (mailto:tobie@w3.org)> wrote:
> > > > > Finally, I'm not sure I understand the benefit of identifying browsers by UUID. (Aren't user agent strings good enough for that?) For a coarser (and more useful) picture, won't version strings do?
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Using the user agent string is not really useful. It is sometimes not specific enough, at other times far too specific and sometimes completely wrong.
> > > 
> > > I'm not advocating using UA strings to organize the results for
> > > display, but to uniquely identify the browser on which the test was
> > > run. This let's you then use a UA string parser of the desired
> > > coarseness to display results. If we don't want to store UA strings,
> > > we should agree on browser names rather than use UUID, in which case
> > > I'd strongly advocate relying on the the names used by Browser Scope's
> > > UA parser[1] which is fully open-sourced. Disclaimer, I co-lead the
> > > project.
> > 
> > 
> > UA-string might be good enough, especially when combined with a good parser that distils the UA-string to the level we want to use it. I'm willing to use the UA-string combined with UA-parser, however, I need to check whether the MIT-license is compatible with the CC-BY that's used by webplatform. I'm still not too much into all the legal stuff to know this from the top of my head ;)
> 
> Using the UA-string as an identifier for data exchange is also not very useful I think.
> 
> The results I collect are not limited to a specific browser or UA string. For example one test result could say: this result is valid for Firefox 20 on desktop. There is not one UA-string for this result. There are maybe a couple of dozen.
I'd argue that this is an interpretation of the result, not the result itself.
> 
> What I think we need is a way to specify the context in which the test is valid and be able to generalise when possible and be specific when required.

Agree 100% for the user-facing output, not so much for a data interchange format.

--tobie

Received on Friday, 18 October 2013 13:04:34 UTC