WebPlatform Weekly Telcon Meeting Notes, 15 July 2014

If anyone who wasn't at the meeting is able to help this week with
(a) modifying templates to get the new compatibility data to display, get
in touch with shepazu
(b) more work on the QA Review, get in touch with me (AmeliaBR)
Meeting notes, 15 July 2014:

Chaired by Doug Schepers (shepazu), scribed by Amelia Bellamy-Royds
(AmeliaBR)


 In attendence:

Doug / shepazu

Renoirb

jensimmons

julee

eliot

Alex

AmeliaBR


 First TOPIC: recap of Monday meeting about re-tooling the Issues tracker

...see Julee's email for details (
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webplatform/2014Jul/0067.html )


 NEXT TOPIC: Compatibility tables

Shepazu: we're live.  Since renoirb did most of the work, can he explain?

renoirb: There was the fault we noticed in testing, that some data was
being lost because of duplicate keys.  We've therefore changed the data
structure to use sub-objects as folders to separate out these
elements.  That required changes to the mediawiki extension.  You need to
specify the top-level "folder" topic.

<@renoirb> updated: docs.webplatform.org/compat/data.json

<@renoirb> docs.webplatform.org/compat/data-human.json

... I also updated the compatibility data & human-readable version (links
^^)

<@renoirb> https://github.com/webplatform/compatibility-data

<@renoirb> http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css/properties/border-radius

julee: Are you saying that, right now, on the website, this information is
not available on the website, but the data is somewhere in the background,
which you consider "live"?

renoirb: The templates need to be changed...

<@renoirb> <compatability feature="css/border-radius"
format="table"></compatability>

shepazu: Briefly, what Julee said is correct.  The templates need to be
changed to use the information in the database.

renoirb:  What I meant by "live" is that it is available on the main wiki
server, and once the templates are changed they can access the data.

...On some of the pages, like the CSS properties, the template is already
available.  But if someone could step in and work on the templates.

<@renoirb> http://docs.webplatform.org/test/Template:CSS_Property

shepazu: Is there someone who can do that this week?  I could try to do
that,

<@renoirb> feature="css/border-raidus'

renoirb: this link on the test wiki already has the working template.  All
we need is to change the template so it is possible to over-ride the topic
(database keys) that the template uses to access the database.  Sometimes
our name is not the same as the MDN.

jensimmons:  Not to get too deep in the details, but I think this is a top
priority.  It's almost done, and if we can get it finished that would be
awesome.

<@renoirb> shepazu, e.g feature="css/pseudo-active"

<@renoirb>
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css/selectors/pseudo-classes/:active

shepazu: I agree with Jen.  Renoirb and I can talk about this later and
figure it out.  It doesn't sound like too much work.

shepazu: one last thing on this topic.  The MDN folks are also working on
improving their compatibility data.  As a gesture of good faith, we should
let them know that we have a normalized version of their data, and it's
available to support their own efforts to improve.  And longer term, we'll
be integrating caniuse and other data, like the test suites.


 NEXT TOPIC: QASprint

shepazu: apologies for not working on it myself

AmeliaBR: our current stats is slightly more than half done:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Projects/QASprints/2014-june

...not where we hoped to be, but with people chugging away maybe we can get
it done by the end of the month.

shepazu: Julee, you did all of yours in one batch in a few hours

Julee: yes, but most of mine were definitely "Not ready" so it was easy to
do, except for those in other languages

AmeliaBR: yes, we'll have to figure those out separately

shepazu: It's mid-July, can we make another push for everyone to get this
done

eliot: Just FYI, we do have Dave Gash working on whatever WPD priority we
chose, which is currently the QA Review

NEXT TOPIC: Quick update on Single Sign On

shepazu: renoirb still's working on.  One change this week was suspending
the Hypothesis annotations system because of confusions from the sign-on
and problems with the number of external resources it was pulling in.

...I'm not sure how easy it will be to streamline that

jensimmons: It's fairly easy to compile multiple CSS files into one with
SASS

shepazu: So long as we can still maintain separate branches on the
backend.  We'd like to get down to one CSS file for the whole site

shepazu: On the Single Sign On, renoirb's having problems with getting the
annotation system to work.  Security restrictions in Internet Explorer are
causing problems.  They (developers at Hypothesis) are working on this, and
we're working with them.  Currently, you could leave annotations, but they
wouldn't "anchor" properly to the page.

...thanks to Eliot, who has got me in touch with the Microsoft guys, but
they don't see an easy work-around either.

 OTHER BUSINESS:

shepazu: welcome back Alex.  Any points?

Alex:  One question: would it be possible to retrieve a structured JSON
feed of all the CSS properties and data?  The Chrome Dev team would love to
have access to this...

<@renoirb> Alex:
http://docs.webplatform.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=logevents&letype=newusers&leprop=timestamp|title|user|userid&lelimit=40&format=json

Renoirb: Yeah, we could talk about this

shepazu: I think it should be possible.  Can we follow up on this next week?

eliot: Can we conduct this discussion on the public list?  I would be
interested as well, and I think a lot of people would be interested in an
API to our content

julee:  We did something like this last year, in Brackets, our code is in
Github.  We only pulled in Summaries, getting it at the JSON object level

...one other thing we did that was interesting; we pulled the data all into
our own database first, for security reasons, instead of working with live
data from WPD

renoirb: that would be a performance issue

...I'll do a search into what you did with Brackets, and mention it in my
email

shepazu: that was one of the goals of this project, to make WPD data
available.

...Anything else?

...This is the doldrums of the summer months, not a lot of DocSprints, but
this is a good time to work on infrastructure and thanks for everyone who's
been doing that

julee: One issue, you talked about annotations.  There's a comments system
on the site right now, are you going to get rid of that?

shepazu: Yes.  We might try to import those to the new system, or we might
just delete them.  Most are out of date.

...one of the problems with that system was there was no notification when
people left a comment, so nothing really happened unless you saw that page.

julee: while looking through, I think there are a number of valid comments
still there.  If we can keep that content in the new system, it would be
great

shepazu: certainly.  If your smell test was that comments are valid then we
can set up a script to import them

julee: Sure. If that's easy.  Most of the comments were "good but minor" --
typos, or newbie questions that suggest an editor should explain things
better

shepazu: I think the first thing is to assess how hard it would be to
import them.  It's good not to throw away people's contributions

...of course, one benefit of the new system is that there will be a way to
tag things as minor issues/typos/question to be answered on the page content

jensimmons: I want to advocate for simplicity.  There is also, under
"Tools" button/menu, the "Discussion" link

AmeliaBR: ...which leads to the Mediawiki talk pages.  Which we don't use,
but there are about a dozen pages that have comments on them

jensimmons: we need to get rid of that.  With annotations back in, that's
three separate comment systems.

renoirb: thanks for mentioning this, I want to do this on the next
mediawiki upgrade.  Also the welcome email.  If anyone wants to work on
these, let me know.

shepazu: Another idea, that has long been put on the back burner, is
Q&A.  Other parts of W3 have been using a discourse server (made by people
who created StackOverflow), and it would be great to have better
integration with the specs work at W3 with WPD

shepazu: It's great to have community volunteers, but I don't think I've
successfully communicated with the people working on specs how they can use
WPD to get information out to developers, focusing on practical
information.  That will be a focus for the next year, I've got support from
the CO.

julee: what's the exact spelling/link?

<@renoirb> http://discourse.specifiction.org/

julee: does it also manage communities?  It looks like there are users with
replies and posts and topics.  Does it have the backend to manage that?

shepazu: I honestly can't say I've looked into it that deeply.  I just
wanted to mention it as possible future collaboration.

<@renoirb> Its using http://www.discourse.org/

<@renoirb> an open source project

julee: it's just that we've talked before about better community
management, so I was wondering if that might be the way

renoirb: When I have more information, I'll prepare something and we can
talk about it.

shepazu: If there's nothing else, thanks everyone.  We'll continue with the
QA and preparing the compatibility table templates.