Re: AppCache post-mortem?

Le lundi 06 mai 2013 à 16:01 +0200, Robin Berjon a écrit :
> On 17/04/2013 11:07 , Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote:
> > The goal is not to distribute blame to specific people or organizations,
> > but rather to find where we are structurally ill-prepared to deal with
> > providing such fundamental technologies.
> 
> For the record, I want to be clear that I'm taking the above seriously 
> and not at all ascribing blame. In any case this is a high-profile 
> feature that got implemented and shipped universally; the way I see it 
> we all screwed up there.

+1

> [summary of the challenges specific to AppCache]

Thanks a lot for sharing your analysis on this! 

>  > What approaches would make this problem less likely to repeat?
> 
> I think that the first thing to take away is that irrespective of 
> whether you believe in modularity for the web platform or not, if you 
> have to modify large swathes of a large spec (e.g. HTML) to add just the 
> one feature, even if it's a powerful feature, then you should probably 
> start seeing red flags.
> If implementers are not noticing some parts of a feature in a spec, then 
> that's another red flag.

OK; so how do we make sure these red flags get raised? and maybe as
importantly, is there anything we can do to make these red flags less
likely to be ignored?

> > * why has it taken almost 2 years since that "realization" and the
> > appearance of alternative proposals?
> 
> I would say that that stems from a variety of factors, mostly human, 
> such as not wanting to interfere with the ongoing development of the 
> HTML specification, finding the energy to untangle the conceptual mess 
> that you need to untangle before you can even think of an alternative 
> design, etc.

Any suggestion as to how to avoid these factors keeping us from faster
progress in the future?

> That's why unglamorous work like that which Anne is doing on Fetch is so 
> important: it makes introducing new features at higher layers a *lot* 
> easier.

Yeah, I'm certainly a strong believer in modularity (when done right :)

> > * does it reflect a broader desktop-focused approach to the development
> > of Web technologies?
> 
> I don't think so, it's not better suited to desktop than it is to 
> mobile. 

To clarify, I didn't mean that AppCache was better suited to desktop
than to mobile; I meant that the use cases that AppCache were meant to
enable are a magnitude of order more important on mobile than on
desktop; thus I was wondering whether the compound of broken design and
long delays to fix it were among things linked to a lesser interest or
awareness of the mobile space. To be honest, I'm not sure how we would
determine that such a link exists or doesn't, but maybe someone has more
ideas than I do on this?

Dom

Received on Tuesday, 7 May 2013 11:53:06 UTC