Re: WebPlatform Browser Support Info

Hey, folks–

On 10/19/13 5:19 AM, Tobie Langel wrote:
> On Saturday, October 19, 2013 at 11:12 AM, PhistucK wrote:
>> I did not see any suggestion or goal regarding one thing - would
>> there be an API or an administration page or a form within
>> webplatform.org (http://webplatform.org) that could be used to add
>> data, or will the data come only from external sources? I assume
>> the former, but unless I missed it, not having this as a goal
>> implies the latter.

You're right that that's missing from the current roadmap. It's 
something we've talked about, but haven't yet decided how to handle it.

There are basically two ways to do this:
1) Allow users to add support information manually in the wiki, like MDN 
does;

2) Require users to submit tests, which can be run to verify support by 
any given browser.

On the one hand, it's much easier to do #1. On the other hand, it's less 
useful, less reliable, and harder to maintain over time.

Obviously, I favor #2. Given that W3C needs to create and run tests 
anyway, I think that's the way to go long term, especially since we also 
have data from other test-based reliable sources. But I'm not opposed to 
a short-term solution using approach #1.


BTW, another advantage of the test-based approach (#2) is that it scales 
to more devices, browsers, etc. Once you have a test, you can run it for 
any environment (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, TV, set-top box, game 
system, etc.) and collect data on that, which readers can drill into to 
fit their need. It also means that for any given test, you're comparing 
apples to apples, so there should be no disputed results (and no edit wars).


> I'm not sure what Doug has in mind here, but for the purpose of the
> current conversation around the data model, users adding data via a
> UI can be considered as just another external resource.

Yeah, for the beta, we just want to display data that is already out there.

Short term, we can let people submit pull requests via git/github to add 
data to the repo. Medium- to long-term, we should add a UI to do so.

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Saturday, 19 October 2013 09:36:37 UTC